When 2012 saw no fewer than three new Resident Evil games, it’s of little surprise that Capcom would rerelease the one that’s generally considered the best of the three: Resident Evil: Revelations. It also happened to be on the 3DS, which gave Capcom another reason to rerelease it as an enhanced port for consoles. Somehow by preserving its original design intended for the 3DS, this home version feels like one of the more streamlined Resident Evils in recent memory. In contrast to the bloated and misguided Resident Evil 6, streamlined does not sound like a bad idea.

Resident Evil: Revelations is certainly canonical, though the self-contained nature of the narrative makes the game feel like a side story. Not that’s a bad thing; it is refreshing to have a game in the series finish what it starts, plot wise. Even the obligatory virus, the T-abyss virus, introduced in this game has not been mentioned in any other Resident Evil since.

The infected area this time around is the fictional floating city of Terragrigia, and a couple of the game’s chapters are set right before the city is obliterated in order to contain the outbreak. The majority of Revelations is set a year after the incident, where familiar and new agents are investigating a cruise ship set near the remains of Terragrigia. Revelations also introduces quite a few new friends and foes that are clearly primed for reappearances in future Resident Evil games. Jessica Sherawat is a curious standout partner, not only because she’s obnoxious, but also because how she turns out by game’s end.

The cruise ship, with its luxurious rooms and symbol-marked doors echo the level designs of the mansion in the original Resident Evil. Yes, you will be spending a good portion of Revelations backtracking as you fetch items and activate switches. This throwback design, with a satisfying amount of enemy encounters and added escape scenarios, is a much-needed change over the linear-intensive Resident Evil 6.

All this familiarity is comforting, though Revelations does take a couple chances with gameplay. There’s no dash, just a brisk fast walk speed, enough to get some distance from any minor boss if you need to collect yourself. There’s also no herb mixing, just green herbs, of which you can only carry five at time. This kind of simplicity works for the game, especially when one green herb brings your health back up to 100 percent.

Revelations also introduces the Genesis bioscanner, a gun-like device that analyzes nearby organisms as well as spots hidden items like ammo clips. It’s helpful in finding stealth bioweapons in the couple stages where they’re invisible. More importantly, the Genesis unlocks an herb after several successful scans. It doesn’t make any sense, but it’s hard to complain when it works to your benefit.

While the Genesis isn’t interesting enough to be a permanent fixture for future Resident Evil games, it does add another layer of tension to the many confining hallway shootouts in Revelations. Should you try to scan an incoming enemy at the risk of getting hurt, or focus on killing it and not scan it at all? Does the risk of getting hurt defeat the purpose of getting a health item? The tension comes from having to make these frequent judgment calls, where the most sensible response might be to simply run past a zombie.

The 3DS was able to handle a full-fledged Resident Evil game, but it wasn’t without some minor hand-cramping criticisms. The chance to replay it with console controllers is a welcome one and is well translated for the most part. It builds upon the off-center perspective introduced in Resident Evil 4, along with zoomed aiming, 180-degree turns, and knife attacks. Timing a dodge can be tricky, but it’s not as tough as getting a melee attack prompt to appear.

Beyond the seven to eight hour campaign, Capcom also ported over the addictive Raid Mode. It serves as an enhanced arcade mode similar to the non-story modes of Resident Evils 5 and 6. Many missions take only five minutes to clear, but there are a lot of points to earn, which then can be spent on items and weapon mods. An experience points system gives Raid a light RPG feel, which is also tied to some of the mode’s unlockables; this includes characters that weren’t playable in the campaign as well as costumes new to this home version of Revelations. Yet what really sells Raid mode is its co-op functionality, which makes up for the lack of campaign multiplayer.

Along with the console controls and bonus characters, the other draw to playing or replaying Revelations is to experience the game with increased visual fidelity over the original version. While the cutscenes do not have the big budget qualities of the cutscenes in Resident Evil 6, they are nonetheless clean and crisp, with a level of detail you could not get in the 3DS.

As a minor downside, some of the in-game visuals bring out Revelations’ made-for-3DS appearance, like a 2D sheet of beached fishes for instance. Having Revelations on the big screen also underscores the heavy use of gray in the zombie character designs, not to mention the limited running animations of the game’s hostile wolves.

For better or worse, you get the same experience on the Wii U version of Revelations that you get on the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 version. The entire game can be played on the television, the gamepad, or both. The dual screen experience of playing on the TV with the gamepad is identical to how the 3DS version operated. That said, not having the gamepad as a dedicated Genesis scanner is a lost opportunity, especially considering its design similarities to Ubisoft’s ZombiU.

So much of what makes Resident Evil: Revelations work is how Capcom plays it safe with level designs and gameplay mechanics. That said, the new characters and the bio scanner help turn the game into something more than a well made by-the-numbers Resident Evil. While it’s not an optimized HD port of the 3DS version (to be so would require enhanced textures across the board), it still looks great and controls even better.

+ Solid HD remaster of the 3DS game

+ Throwback Resident Evil gameplay

— No remarkable enhancements

8 / 10

Between the iOS spin-off of Borderlands and the upcoming XCOM: Enemy Unknown port this summer, 2K has made some solid pushes into the mobile space. Complementing these familiar IPs is Haunted Hollow, a new Halloween-themed title that walks that fine line in offering both strategy-based depth and all-ages accessibility.

Haunted Hollow presents an all-star roster of familiar monsters including a mummy, a witch, and even a wendigo. Much like the film Monsters Inc., these guys are tasked in scaring people. The difference is that the victims are adult villagers who know how to fight back.

Working alongside the villagers, you have to outlast a rival gang of monsters, controlled by another player on the other end of the village. Playing against a person is a much more rewarding experience than the AI, as the latter lacks challenge. Furthermore, the game doesn’t have a single player narrative, which would have complemented the game’s cartoon-like art direction. The monsters and humans are well designed enough to warrant some kind of light hearted dialogue and exposition, even if it was just through word bubbles.

When playing on the side of the monsters you’re tasked to haunt each house, and when you do the villager takes refuge at the local church. Scare enough of them and the townsfolk will form a mob. Seeing the mob break out of the church is one of the more endearing visuals in what is already a consistently charming game. Yes, you want to avoid them, but that doesn’t mean you can’t admire them for taking a stand.

As with many strategy games, much of your success comes down to maximizing your base resources. That involves building more rooms in your haunted house that leads to more monsters. You won’t be able to go nuts and build 160 rooms like Sarah Winchester, but you do get a nice variety of room interiors.

Haunted Hollow is a free-to-play game, but one that offers in-app products in the most reasonable ways possible. The out-of-the-box cast of monsters (vampire, ghost, zombie, werewolf, Frankenstein) is well-rounded enough that you can hold your own against a player who has paid for a siren, goblin or any of the other optional monsters. Even though there can be imbalances if you’re taking on someone who’s paid a lot of money for special items, you can easily compete if you learn how to upgrade your monsters properly. And if you don’t prefer the default Victorian mansion, you can also purchase other house styles like a lost temple or a mad scientist lab.

With homebuilding, a rival monster summoner, and the justifiably angry villagers, Haunted Hollow offers the kind of multitasking stimulation that is worthy of the attention of real time strategy fans. Granted, the multiplayer is asynchronous, but that makes the game equally welcoming to newcomers of strategy games.

+ Easy to learn strategy gameplay

+ Endearing art style

- Easy battles against the AI

8.5 / 10

As the latest character DLC of Borderlands 2, Krieg has a bit of Salvador and Brick about him, especially when it comes to proficiency in melee combat. The twist is that he’s a psycho bandit; he looks just like one of the countless bad guys you’ve spent hundreds of hours killing throughout the series. Gearbox Software isn’t merely handing you the controls of any ordinary psycho; Krieg is fitted just like any other playable Borderlands character, which his own unique skill tree and abilities to complement any co-op foursome.

Whereas the Mechromancer DLC character often felt like a loyalty reward that appealed to advanced Borderlands 2 players, Krieg the Psycho Bandit caters to all experience levels, and especially to players who get off on high risk-high reward experiences. An ability like Buzzaxe has an unusually long cool down period, but that time is shortened with every hit you take. It’s as if the game is encouraging you to embrace your inner psycho and go nuts with melee attacks in the expectation you will get hit in the process. Furthermore, a reactivated Buzzaxe replenishes a bit of health with every kill. To say it’s a vicious cycle is an understatement.

As one who enjoys dealing melee kills in every practical instance in first-person shooters, I felt positively drunk with power when using Krieg. If the Buzzaxe cycle of death wasn’t enough, going down the Mania ability path only amplifies this lifestyle of close quarters combat. This not only includes a 250% damage increase on melee kills, but also added boosts when you get hit.

Bloodlust and Hellborn are the two other ability paths, and they’re more technical compliments to Mania. They help boost various kinds of damage as well as provide fire-based enhancements. Hellborn is especially fitting for Krieg’s psychotic tendencies since many of this tree’s skills sets him on fire, for his benefit of course.

Krieg can’t be a true Borderlands 2 psycho unless he is as suicidal as he is homicidal. His ‘Light the Fuse’ skill gives the middle finger to ‘Fight For Your Life,’ allowing him to blow up in the hopes of taking others with him. It’s a creative and fitting twist to the series’ ‘second chance’ feature. ‘Light the Fuse’ is just one of the many benefits Krieg has to help round off a four player squad, especially if that team is in need of a fearless melee maniac. As such, I got way more enjoyment out of him when I played co-op as opposed to solo, partially because my friends found it entertaining to watch Krieg’s frantic actions.

Making the most of Krieg requires more situational awareness than other Borderlands 2 characters. Between watching your health and cooldowns in your UI while dealing melee kills in crowds, there’s a lot to handle. What you do get out of Krieg is a palatable rush regardless of how often you die, and at least dying gives you the chance of taking enemies with you.

+ Close quarters paradise

+ Encourages high risk for high rewards

- Tough for non-multitaskers

9 / 10

In the high school drama of videogames, Metro: Last Light is that kid that comes back after the summer break wearing trendy new clothes and an overwrought desire to be loved by everyone. While weird kids like Dark Souls find a group of friends by embracing their quirks, Metro: Last Light wants to be one of the AAA cool kids by scrubbing its personality clean. The result is a game packed with impressive-looking scripted scenes and a disappointing lack of gameplay depth and difficulty.

As much as I want to be upset that Metro: Last Light is just following the AAA playbook, I have to admit there are some cool and unique moments in this game. But by the time it’s over, that’s all you have–a handful of memorable moments diluted by competent but unexceptional hours of forgettable gameplay.

The story, at least, is a faithful extension of Metro 2033. You again play as the mute Artyom, a ranger in the strange subterranean world of the Metro. In case you aren’t familiar with the game’s setting, here’s a crash course: World War III led to a nuclear apocalypse forcing the residents of Moscow to survive in the city’s Metro tunnels. Now the surface is irradiated and filled with mutants while savage living conditions have turned the Metro into a warlike no-man’s land of tribalism.

Last Light’s story follows the events of 2033, assuming the ending in which Artyom fires a salvo of missiles at the Dark Ones (a newly-discovered race of mutant surface dwellers). As the game opens, the rangers have discovered a surviving Dark One and task Artyom with finishing it off. As in 2033 a simple task soon derails, sending you through mysterious and abandoned sections of the Metro and uncovering a vast conspiracy between the Metro’s major factions along the way.

The story and characters are decent but don’t live up to the AAA ambitions evident in the game’s presentation. For instance, one character constantly drops jovial banter designed to endear the player to him. Instead, he just comes off as annoying… which neuters the emotional weight of his eventual betrayal. Though just as thick with characters, betrayal, and double-crosses, Last Light is less organized and impactful than, say, Black Ops II. Similarly, the voice acting isn’t the best.

The way the story is delivered is a bigger problem. Last Light finds ways to immobilize you for long stretches at a time, whether you’re physically restrained or just waiting for an NPC to walk to a door. You spend a lot of time in following NPCs, either waiting for them to clear the way for you or praising you for the simplest accomplishments.

Once the game is done directing you about, you can explore or fight by yourself and the experience is much more enjoyable (not to mention more similar to 2033). Combat comes in two flavors–versus humans or the mutated monsters of the Metro. Moving through areas teeming with hostile humans is the more interesting of the two, giving you the option of stealth or a direct combat approach. While the ability to choose your strategy is appreciated, the stealth system is extremely basic. You’re either visible or you’re not, and if you’re supposedly shrouded in darkness you can all but walk right up to an enemy and knock him out.

The simplified level design doesn’t enhance this gameplay either. In every stealth / combat stretch, there’s always a directed stealth path to follow that’s obvious if you find it. Shadows, light switches, and optional tunnels string together to create a direct route, leaving very little to your imagination when it comes to playing stealthily. It’s still fun to do, but the enjoyment wears off when you realize you’re just following a set path plotted out by the developers.

You don’t always have to sneak, and engaging in direct firefights is intense because of the lights and sounds of combat. However, Last Light’s combat is much different than 2033’s. Artyom is much beefier this time around. You can take a lot of damage before going down, meaning there’s no mechanical threat to engaging enemies head-on. Just find a box to hide behind and you can kill everything with the basic revolver without breaking a sweat.

Fighting Metro’s mutants is fun in a Doom sort of way, but a lack of enemy variety makes these encounters wear thin within minutes. You spend most of your time shooting dog-like enemies that blindly run and swipe at you, leaving little in the way of intellect or strategy in each combat encounter. If you shoot them before they hit you and run in circles while reloading you can handle anything the Metro can throw at you.

Playing on a harder difficulty could add more depth to the combat, but 2033’s infamous Ranger Mode wasn’t available while I played the game. The situation there is a little sticky as well. It’s DLC, and while the first run of Last Light will come with a download code for the mode, that doesn’t ensure everyone will have access to it. If you’ve already played 2033, I recommend playing with that mode first. Otherwise, you have to sit through all the cutscenes and scripted conversations again when you start a second playthrough.

Instead of its story or gameplay, Last Light succeeds most as a sort of digital tourism. Occasionally you can explore the world at your own pace, overhearing conversations and absorbing the detail of the game world. There are some great scenes here, like participating in a shooting gallery of live mice and then walking around the stage to see the poor schmo that has to mop the resulting rat chunks. These occasional moments of sincerity and charm show glimmers of a more profound experience, but the game soon reverts back to script-heavy action sequences and self-serious dialogue.

Even treated as a vector for digital exploration, Last Light still doesn’t match the immersive quality of its predecessor. The problem is visual–2033, despite coming out three years ago, still looks better than Last Light. 2033’s lighting conveyed the oppressive, unknown dangers of the Metro extremely well. Every hallway cut off into complete darkness. Light was a precious commodity because you couldn’t see a damn thing without it, which made the use of your flashlight a danger when around enemies. By comparison, Last Light is brighter, cleaner, and more sterile. You can see just fine with no lights at all. 2033’s fantastic lighting and texture work conveyed the closed and dark environments of the Metro much more believably than Last Light does. That’s not to say there aren’t some gorgeous environments in Last Light, but on the whole its lighting is more boring and flat.

By cycling through scripted AI encounters, combat sections, and low-key free-roam areas, Metro: Last Light is a dour, Russian themed take on Half-Life 2. Only problem is that none of those aspects work together in a mutually beneficial way. Last Light isn’t as gameplay-dense an action / stealth experience as Dishonored and it’s not as impossibly polished as Call of Duty. If you enjoy directed single-player experiences, you can’t go wrong with Last Light… just don’t expect the most focused or deep experience.

+ Good mix of gameplay
- Experience doesn’t combine effectively
+ Solid single player game

7.5 / 10

Sacred Citadel plucks several mechanics from classic side-scrolling fighters that many have played and loved: Golden Axe, Double Dragon, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and intertwines these mechanics with fun and exciting RPG elements in a simple yet elegant visual style more suitable to modern day. It’s a comfortably-sized game with some frustrating low notes, but it offers a pleasant, almost nostalgic beat ‘em up experience for the time and money invested.

The game is a hack-n-slash-style action RPG that can be played alone or with up to three friends. There are a total of four acts with 4 to 5 levels within, each with their own theme, enemy set and end-boss.

The story within Sacred Citadel is straightforward and silly. There are no mind-blowing plot twists or jaw-dropping betrayals; it’s a simple hero’s journey across varied lands in an attempt to stop evil of all sorts (with some respectable but still wholly cheesy dialogue in tow). In a non-spoiler-y nutshell, you play one of four heroes set on taking down evil creatures hell-bent on doing evil things in pursuit of evil goals. It revolves around the retrieval of sacred artifacts that wield great power – and surprise, surprise, the aforementioned evil people want it.

The four character options include the close-combat-oriented Warrior, the distance-loving Ranger, the sorcery-skilled Shaman and the staff-wielding Mage. Combat will be familiar to those already acquainted with side-scrolling fighters, as you’ll dice, freeze, burn and bash enemies with punch and special move combos galore.

Each stage consists of scripted sequences that have you combating hordes of enemies skilled at both close-range and distance fighting. As you progress, new areas might contain an environmental hazard like swinging logs, puddles of acid, and falling stones, to name a few. These hazards can be used to your creative offensive advantage, but they can also be just as self-inflicting – so it’s always important to stay on your toes and use your blocks and dodge rolls frequently.

This leads to a great point regarding Sacred Citadel’s balance: you can’t button mash your way through the whole game. While most of the small enemies will fall back after a few swings, the medium and larger enemies will require the use of combos and chained moves to be defeated, especially as they arrive in droves in the game’s more difficult later half. But just as your feeling overwhelmed, the game will throw you a bone, like an elephant-like creature to ride that has a crossbow attached to its rear and a cannon to its front. Each stage is more or less the same: you take down some enemies, nab some loot and level up. Rinse and repeat.

As the game is an action RPG, elements of upgrades and point distribution are actively featured and implemented with simplicity and optimization in mind. Your skill buckets are a simple button press away, and consist of four categories: Attack, Defense, Dexterity, and Power. Though you acquire points to assign to these categories every time you level up, you also come across randomly dropped equipment that usually provides some sort of upgrade or trade-off to your current load out.

Following the theme of simplicity with the interface, small windows appear on-screen to immediately tell you if the weapon or armor is better or worse than your current choice. Design implementations like these are just one of many great features of Sacred Citadel, in that it doesn’t want you spending time in the menus. And what time it does put you in menus is entirely optional, like checking out move combos and point distribution (which already takes mere seconds). There’s even towns you can visit outside of the stage menu where you can buy health, rage (which gives you enhanced attack damage for a limited time), and power potions (which give you instant access to power moves when used), new armor and equipment, and speak with a gambling man who will place bets on your ability to complete challenges, in which your reward is more cash to spend. Additional interface nuances like not allowing you to accidentally swap weapons with those on the battlefield during a battle (but allowing it after all enemies are cleared) are a nice touch and help avoid frustrating moments.

Aside from combat, there are small platforming sections that help pace out and segment the level. It’s pleasurable and rewarding to spend ten straight minutes pounding away at a group of mining dwarves and forest trolls to then spend a minute hopping from rock to rock over a peaceful river, or bouncing from stilted walkway to stilted walkway in a mineshaft.

Sacred Citadel is a visual treat. It encompasses both the simplicity of water-color-style paintings and the rounded, color-infused cel-shaded charm of The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. From the bubbly lava underworld to the snow covered alps to the green forests with blue brooks, the game is beautiful with its use of color and ensures each world feels unique. The ambient environment sounds mixed with the satisfying clashes and clanks of your weapons strikes a good, cohesive chord for the sound department – even if the Ranger’s bow and arrow sounds sort of squishy when fired.

That said the game is short. As in, you’ll have the game beaten in less than five or six hours. Yet, that time-to-beat-window only presents an issue if you plan to avoid replays with additional characters, not co-op with your buddies, nor pursue nabbing high scores to top the leaderboards.

Speaking of co-op, where the game suffers most is in its multiplayer, in that the game occasionally suffered from lag compensation issues that lead to a confusing and out-of-sync online experience. I frequently witnessed different enemy/player situations than that of my friend’s and it was pretty disconcerting. The local co-op works great and lacks these issues – save for a few notable moments where there was a bit too much going on onscreen.

Sacred Citadel is a fine hack n’ slash side-scroller, and it’s even better with friends. The online netcode could use an upgrade and I wish there was a bit more content to flesh out the package, but for the price, Sacred Citadel is a solid adventure to be had. And it doesn’t force you into piles of menus to manage your character – that’s a bonus in itself, am I right?

+ Simple, Elegant, Stylish Interface and Aesthetic

+ Solid Pacing to Levels and Overall Challenge

- Online Co-Op Needs Work

7.5 / 10

Believe it or not, there was a time in the eighties when people genuinely enjoyed ridiculous male power fantasies. These “stories” typically revolved around an ex-military protagonist whose scant depth of personality was juxtaposed with his gigantic steroid-fueled muscles. Meaningful plot or dialogue was replaced with a skyrocketing body count as the invincible protagonist mowed through waves of faceless, meaningless thugs.

Can you believe that we no longer entertain such one-dimensional entertainment? Oh wait; it’s basically every shooter ever.

Rather than accept that implicit absurdity, Blood Dragon turns the volume up as loud as it can on all the precepts of the ‘80s that used to be such serious business. In that regard, the game’s opening hour is superlative. An introductory cutscene sets the stage with jagged, low-resolution spritework: the year is 2007 and “the apocalypse has had an apocalypse.” You are Rex Power Colt, a commando brought back from the brink of death with gaudy cybernetic implants. Now equipped with a laser eye and a chromed mechanical arm, you must stop the Omega Force from ruling the world with an armament of laser rifles, laser swords, laser shurikens, laser bows, and laser… dinosaurs (more on them later).

Once the tutorials are finished and the overpowered introductory guns are yanked away from you, the game plays like a palette-swapped Far Cry 3. You’re given a scaled-down island to freely roam that is populated with outposts to liberate, scientists to save, and story missions to accomplish. Instead of the verdant greens and blues of Far Cry 3’s island, Blood Dragon’s locales glow in neon orange and purple. It’s as though the entire game is played under a blacklight, and the visuals are so striking the game’s worth playing for that alone.

Blood Dragon’s combat retains the same Far Cry DNA, which is most appreciable when liberating outposts sprinkled across the island. Since these take place in outdoor environments, you’re given freedom to plan your approach, survey the enemy with your cyber-eye, and then infiltrate using a mix of stealth and direct combat. Or you could just sic a laser dinosaur on them.

OK so they’re actually called Blood Dragons but “laser dinosaur” is more apt. These glowing T-rexes prowl Blood Dragon’s island and attack anything they see indiscriminately. If you lure them into an enemy base by throwing a cyber-heart you’ve obtained from a fallen enemy, you can sit back and watch waves of bike helmet-wearing goons fruitlessly attack a neon dinosaur that shoots lasers out of his eyes.

In case you haven’t pieced it together yet, this game is pretty crazy.

The game’s story missions are less mechanically interesting, generally taking place in enclosed, underground compounds. There is some planning involved if you want to go the stealth route — kill this guy before that one, throw a rock (now a D20) over here to lure an enemy away… the experience is nearly identical to Far Cry 3.

The gameplay’s texture is slightly different thanks to Colt’s abilities that make you feel like an ‘80s badass. You come loaded with most of Far Cry 3’s advanced skills from the get-go, including chain kills and death from above. Quietly cleaning rooms of enemies isn’t difficult and there’s not much of a consequence if you’re seen, aside from another handful of guys to shoot in the face. Given that the side content is more mechanically interesting than the story missions, it’s bizarrely in Blood Dragon’s favor that the story is short. You can blast through the story in two or three hours, whereas four or five can be spent liberating outposts and completing side quests.

Unlike Far Cry 3, Blood Dragon is much more direct when it comes to progression and unlocks. Leveling up adds more life bars and new player abilities while completing specific side quests unlocks new gun attachments and upgrades. The heaps of collectible items from Far Cry 3 don’t return, which is just fine by me. The fourth time I filled my inventory with the wrong kind of hide was enough.

Mechanics aside, Blood Dragon succeeds most in its presentation. Influences from the eighties permeate at every level of the experience, whether you’re looking at the absurd plot that works in notes of Asian infatuation and communist terror or the crouch icon that mirrors the iconic hunched-forward Terminator post-time-warp pose. Powerglove’s score fits the game like a… well, you know. It’s equal parts schlocky ‘80s synthpop and retro video game throwbacks. The tracks mix iconic, reverb-laced drum machines with that farty, warbly bass that came from late ‘80s arcade cabinets and the Sega Megadrive.

More than any one reference or throwback, Blood Dragon is creativity unrestrained and uncompromised. It’s a product from a team that had a love for what they were making and didn’t have to justify or temper their creative ambition at any point in the development process. Even if the game isn’t mechanically bulletproof, it’s worth playing just to see an unfettered creative joy that’s becoming rare in a progressively homogenized industry.

And that’s the most poetic point Blood Dragon can make. Nobody made action parodies in the ‘80s because it was serious business at the time. Who would laugh at Arnold shirtless, holding a chaingun, shooting waves of thugs? This is what people want to see.

In the same way, now nobody mocks self-serious shooters because that’s where the money is. Blood Dragon is a reminder that a story about one man killing thousands is just silly. That’s fine though, because games don’t always need to be serious. Games should just be fun, and that’s exactly what Blood Dragon is.

+ Amazing creative vision

+ Entertaining, miniaturized Far Cry experience

- Flat, short story missions

8.5 / 10

I’ve mulled over and over how to tackle Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen. Neglecting artistic concerns, it’s hard to comprehend it just as a product. It’s an expansion, yes, but you can’t buy it as DLC – you have to buy a new disc, which complicates its value proposition. If that weren’t enough, the new Dark Arisen content is plentiful different from the main game that it can’t simply be qualified as “more of the same.” This conflicts with how we typically think of expansion content… but that doesn’t make it bad.

The neatest bottom line I can draw is that Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen is a must-play for any action RPG fans that missed its first release in 2012. The situation is trickier for everyone else, and requires more understanding about how Dark Arisen’s content fits in with the first game.

If the original Dragon’s Dogma, with its huge outdoor world, near-comical emergent scenes, and unpredictable difficulty spikes is the Japanese Skyrim, then Dark Arisen is the Japanese Dark Souls. Err… there are issues with that comparison, but hopefully you understand my meaning. Dark Arisen’s new content consists of a single, massive dungeon sprawling beneath Bitterback Isle. This dungeon trades away the idyllic fantasy landscapes of Dragon’s Dogma’s Gransys for enclosed (though varied) environments. As you work your way down, down, down towards… something (goals are vague in that Dark Souls way), you move through sewer tunnels, castle hallways, and pastoral clearings with trees and wildlife with little to no transitions in-between.

The jarring cuts between locales are a probable symptom of Capcom’s rearranging existing assets from Dragon’s Dogma to create new areas, but it creates a beneficial effect: Going from a pitch-black water-filled hallway to a fire-lit stone corridor in an instant is surreal. These transitions make Dark Arisen’s dungeon feel like a warped, stitched-together aberration of reality rather than lazy patchwork of game content. Dark Arisen’s depths are a schizophrenic stretch of Wonderland.

The monsters prowling that Wonderland echo the same shades of content reuse, though less effectively. Many of Dragon’s Dogma’s basic enemies like skeletons and wolves have been scaled up in size and stats, making for boring fights that don’t offer anything new in the way of attack patterns or challenge. Sadly, these make up the majority of Dark Arisen’s “new” bosses, which is a shame considering the handful of actual new enemies are incredible. The most notable is a multi-story demon that looks like God of War’s Hades. It’s the sort of enemy that makes you turn around the instant you see it, convinced that it will kill you, delete your save, and ignite your PlayStation just by looking in your direction.

Dark Arisen’s new item system heaps hours of potential plundering onto the original game along with a subtle hook for microtransactions. Rift crystals are the new de facto currency, now consumed to “decurse” mysterious items you pull from the dungeon (similar to Diablo’s identify feature). You can also now improve items past their levels in the original game, but doing so requires — you guessed it — rift crystals. Even checkpoints must be reassembled by cramming them full of crystals. All of this makes cynical sense once you discover that you can buy packs of rift crystals for small chunks of money. I never ran out of crystals myself, but I can appreciate how devious it would be to have no crystals and a trove of unidentified items, any of which could be The Sword You’re Looking For. The subtle gambling slant is a digital interpretation on the blind box toy craze.

Despite the content re-use, subtle microtransaction hooks, and gnawing similarities to Dark Souls, I still had fun playing the new content. Dragon’s Dogma’s mechanics and combat work well in Dark Arisen’s dungeon setting, regardless of how similar it may be to another game. It plays like Dark Souls at 150% speed and a bit more forgiveness when it comes to combat, which is just fine by me.

But there are ways in which Dark Arisen’s twists on Dark Souls’ formulas don’t work so well. My biggest gripe is that boss monsters can “move” throughout the dungeon, supposedly attracted by a buildup of corpses from your slain enemies. Regardless of pretense, it just means an impossibly strong boss may drop in on you for no real reason. I guess Capcom was shooting for exciting unpredictability, but in reality a visit from a larger boss just forces you to run from your task at hand while possibly picking off a pawn that wouldn’t get his/her ass in gear. It’s a nuisance; one that adds nothing to the experience. At least it doesn’t happen often.

My other main complaint stems from the dungeon’s organization. While there are some hub areas that reduce the amount of travel time from the dungeon entrance to your deepest traveled point, you’re locked to linear progression through the dungeon. That’s not bad on its own, but if you hit a boss you aren’t a high enough level to tackle, you have no other recourse aside from returning to the main game to grind out some levels. There’s no path but forward; no solution but more levels.

That’s why it’s ideal if you haven’t even touched the original game yet. Dark Arisen’s content is best enjoyed in chunks alongside Dragon’s Dogma’s main quest, both mechanically and thematically. Hopping back and forth between Gransys’ wide-open areas and Bitterback Isle’s thick dungeons makes for an enjoyable, varied, and gameplay-dense experience, provided you haven’t explored every inch of Gransys already. If you have, you can import your existing save from Dragon’s Dogma into Dark Arisen, but Arisen’s dungeon would grate without a vacation in Gransys here and there to punctuate it.

Gamers tend to balk when one series borrows liberally from another. Whether or not you regard the strokes of Souls in Dark Arisen as theft or inspiration doesn’t change the fact that there’s a whole lot of game in Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen, and almost all of it is fun. From that perspective, I can almost understand Capcom’s ballsy method of releasing this content as a pack-in with the original game only, but it does complicate who would enjoy this game and why.

Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen is a great product, objectively speaking, but its worth depends on your circumstances as a player. If you missed out on Dragon’s Dogma the first time around, Dark Arisen is a must-play. Arisen’s content is different from the original game, but in a way that’s additive when combined with the experience. On the other end of the spectrum, dedicated Dogma fans will get their money’s worth thanks to the increased level cap, scads of new items, and new end-game boss encounters. I’m not fooling myself though — if you’re on your third new game+ run, odds are you didn’t wait for this review to buy the game anyway.

If you fall anywhere in the middle — maybe you played Dragon’s Dogma a little and thought it was decent — Dark Arisen isn’t substantive or profound enough to justify its price on its own.

+ Tons of content

+ Dark Arisen’s dungeon is fun and different

— Awkward retail-only release

8.5 / 10

With the slate of recent retro indie releases, I’ve always wondered how much of their appeal comes from solid design or simple nostalgia. Playing Dragon Fantasy: Book I has answered that question. As a game that purely relies on nostalgia, it’s boring, dull, and pointless past the first ten minutes of ‘oh I remember this.’ Even if your childhood is paved with JRPG classics like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, you won’t find enough in Dragon Fantasy to justify your time.

I can at least appreciate the spirit of the game. You play as Ogden, a past-his-prime warrior that already performed his JRPG hero duties some years before the game opens. After an evil-something-or-other attacks the idyllic town of it-doesn’t-really-matter, Ogden — now balding and portly — must yet again take up the hero mantle. I enjoy the premise at least; you’ve done all this before and it’s time to strap the boots back on.

Unfortunately, as a game Dragon Fantasy doesn’t remotely live up to its forebears. It lines up with JRPG tropes perfectly: you walk around in a city filled with single-tile denizens that only say one line of dialogue and then venture through dungeons packed with random encounters. While the dialogue in the game does poke lighthearted fun at genre stereotypes, the combat falls face-first into them.

In battle, you have the iconic set of commands: fight, magic, items, and run. However, every fight in the game is a matter of mashing fight until you run low on health and then healing yourself with magic. Over and over. For hours at a time. I’ll admit older JRPGs have the reputation of playing this way, but most manage to add some depth through interesting spells or challenging enemies. Dragon Fantasy doesn’t even manage that. In Dragon Fantasy, even your most powerful spells are just as damaging as your basic attack as soon as you get them, and the only solution to a challenging fight is grinding for more levels.

The typical JRPG accoutrement is absent in Dragon Fantasy as well, which exacerbates the problem. You only ever fight one enemy at a time and the AI is dirt basic (putting you to sleep multiple times after you’re already asleep, etc). There’s space on the UI for a party of four, but I played for ten hours and still didn’t get a second member. With circa-1988 gameplay features absent, you can forget about modern niceties like auto-wins, auto-battle, or item sort.

Even the music — which is a staple for JRPGs — hits some serious snags. It’s not that great of a soundtrack to begin with, though I can empathize scoring a game that will be compared to the work of Nobuo Uematsu or Koichi Sugiyama. The bigger problem is that the music restarts every time you get into a random encounter, and the encounter rate is so damn high that you’ll never hear more than four seconds of any non-town music. Your experience with this game will be hearing the same four-second music loops over and over while you mash X to get through boring fights as fast as possible.

There is a silver lining here, though. Dragon Fantasy supports crossplay, thus it comes with the PlayStation Vita version of the game in addition to supporting cloud-based cross-saves. Though this is a backwards compliment, I enjoyed playing this game as a sleep aide with my Vita in bed. And, though the feature is ultimately invalidated by boring gameplay, I do appreciate that you can switch the game’s visuals and sound back and forth between 8 and 16-bit mode. Swapping back and forth does lighten the gameplay fatigue, but not by much.

As a longtime JRPG fan, I appreciate the irony. I can’t count the number of times I’ve defended the genre from people claiming it’s a mindless exercise of mash-X-until-you-win, but throwbacks like Dragon Fantasy don’t make the stigma any easier to dispel. Games like Cthulhu Saves the World and Anodyne show us that it’s possible to celebrate classic genres while still employing interesting design. It’s a shame Dragon Fantasy couldn’t do the same.

+ Briefly enjoyable retro throwbacks

— Painfully boring, mindless combat

— Uninteresting game structure

4 / 10

Nobody walks up to someone playing Go and asks why they’re playing a stupid game with only two colors of pieces. Nobody sits down to a game of Chess and laments that the board really should be bigger. These games achieve competitive perfection by stripping out as much as possible, producing a core competitive experience that’s timeless and addicting.

ShootMania Storm strives for the same perfection-through-simplicity, which flies in the face of what we’re conditioned to want as gamers. If you judge a game by its number of maps, modes, levels, unlocks, and guns, ShootMania is not for you. However, if you’re looking for an intelligent, competitive shooter, nothing out there can beat it.

Dedication to minimalism makes ShootMania give a deceptively simple first impression. You have a gun (singular) and a discrete amount of hits you can take before you’re eliminated. You shoot other guys and avoid getting shot. You don’t level up, you don’t upgrade anything, and you don’t earn loads of superficial titles, emblems, or medals.

But don’t take that to mean the game is devoid of depth. You could take any of ShootMania’s basic systems and write volumes about how its implementation affects gameplay and strategy. Take weaponry for instance: your basic gun holds four shots of a traveling projectile, and once fired those shots slowly recharge.

Already this mechanic opens up tons of potential strategies. If your opponent moves predictably, you can hang back and rely on your prediction of his movements to lead shots and hit. If not, you might have to close in and shoot all your shots in one big salvo, hoping for a lucky hit. Predicting movement and judiciously saving ammunition while monitoring your opponent’s is a core principle to ShootMania, and there’s never a right or wrong approach.

ShootMania’s experience remains intricate no matter how high you crank up the magnification on it’s mechanics. Even the movement physics are complex. While they take a note from the Quake shooters of yore in speed, there’s a unique “stamina” mechanic that resembles skiing from Starsiege: Tribes or Tribes 2. If used in the air, you can redirect your momentum in another direction. It’s very subtle — just enough to cause a leading shot to miss or just make a ledge that gives you a quicker path to a capture point. On larger maps, converting a long drop to fast forward movement over open ground is vital. The scenarios are boundless.

Map design elegantly layers on top of basic gameplay mechanics, mainly because that’s how you use different guns. Rather than pick them up ala Quake or swap them out Halo style, your gun changes based on where you stand. For instance, some maps have sniper ledges that transform your projectile shooter into an instant hitscan-style railgun. The twist? It changes your jump to zoom, meaning you’re locked to the floor. A sniper may have a weapon advantage, but if the platform is surrounded by waist-high barriers, that sniper can only fall off the platform in a specific spot, giving all his opponents a predictable path of travel they could capitalize on. Of course, he could use stamina mid-fall to try and fake out the attackers… it goes on and on.

All these tiny game scenarios I describe are hopefully painting a picture. ShootMania, more than any shooter I’ve played, is about metagame and strategy. Rather than spray until someone dies, engagements in ShootMania are dogfights. You have to create situations that are advantageous for you through strategic thinking and map knowledge, and then have the mechanical skill in aiming and shooting to execute on them.

The game’s modes do a fantastic job of fostering those principles. What’s more, you won’t find a single copycat competitive mode in ShootMania, and all of them work. Well, all the ones I played worked, but more on that later. The value and rarity of ShootMania’s inventive modes can’t be understated, especially for fans of shooters. You can count off the new game modes in the last decade on one hand: Battlefield’s capture and old, Call of Duty’s kill confirmed, and Counter-Strike’s gun game and defuse.

My favorite of ShootMania’s modes is Joust, perhaps owing to my many hours with Quake 2’s Rocket Arena mod. It’s a 1v1 dueling mode on a small map with two towers. When you start, you don’t have a gun until you touch one of the towers, which gives you five shots that don’t recharge. To reload, you have to cross the map and touch the other tower. If you take too long to touch up (on the order of 45 seconds), you’re eliminated.

The dramatic events created by this ruleset are amazing. Say both you and your opponent are out of ammo, but you’re both headed to the same tower and you touch before he does. Now you have all the control. You can try to screen him out and go for a timer elimination or peg him as he tries to approach. But what if he pulls off some great dodges and forces you to waste your ammo? The situation reverses. He touches up, gets all the ammo, and you have to juke your way across the map to top up at the other tower.

Other modes are equally intelligent. Take Royal, which most closely resembles traditional Deathmatch. It’s a simple melee with a capturable tower in the center of the arena. Once captured, players can no longer respawn, and a massive tornado starts contracting from the outside of the map inward. This forces players to run from a wall of instant death while progressively cramming into a smaller area. Rounds usually end in a nail-biting standoff between two skilled shooters in the eye of the tornado, which is fun to watch even for those eliminated.

ShootMania’s take on capture-and-hold, called Battle, is refreshing after years of the mode’s near-ubiquity. There are three points that you capture to win but you can only capture points while you’re team is in an “attack” phase. Whoever gets to the middle of the map first at the round’s start gets the first attack, and you only switch to defense if 14 seconds go by without standing on any tower. It puts more emphasis on player position and engagement — if you keep your opponents busy away from your towers, they’ll never have a chance to reset or prolong their attack timer.

There are other modes in the game… at least that’s what the server filter would imply. Heroes and Siege sound interesting, but I didn’t find a single server running them. That’s only the beginning of issues surrounding ShootMania’s menus, browsers, and infrastructure. Simply put, playing ShootMania is divine; everything else about ShootMania is not.

It’s possible that the functional omissions in ShootMania are made because the potential playerbase would be used to 1998-era infrastructure for their games, but that doesn’t make it any more excusable in 2013. To start, the menus hardly look better than external server browsers from back in the day like Gamespy 3D. While it does support the most basic of options (filter by game type, empty servers, full servers), why can’t I see my ping? Why are some servers visible through some game “channels” and not through others? Furthermore, what are the channels and why do they even exist?

As anachronistic as ShootMania’s interface may be, it is still possible to find a game and start playing, so at least it’s functional. That can’t be said of ShootMania’s buddy system, which is confusing beyond reckoning. Somehow upon logging in I already had some 20 buddies imported from Steam (I think…) though only four of which were visible at any time. Some of these buddies would be “online,” but I wouldn’t be able to talk to them. Most damning of all, once I added a new ShootMania friend and could use the in-game chat (which is awful, by the way), there was no simple “join friend” option to follow them to a server. We simply exchanged server names through Steam chat like cavemen.

It’s a real shame, too, because with better social connectivity and robust infrastructure (I’m imagining web-based stats, modern messaging), ShootMania could really be special. Instead, it’s a fabulously designed game with an interface so antiquated that only the most dedicated and nostalgic shooter enthusiasts will stick with it. In the end, maybe that’s for the best. You don’t see a lot of trucker hat-wearing Natty Ice-drinkers in Go parlours either.

+ Great level of depth in game mechanics
+ Inventive and unique competitive modes
- Dated menu interface

8 / 10

Ryu Hayabusa is back and more brutal than ever in Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor’s Edge from Tecmo Koei and the wetwork wizards at Team Ninja. In the tradition of Ninja Gaiden Sigma and its sequel, Razor’s Edge is essentially a remastered release of 2012′s Ninja Gaiden 3 – first released on the Wii U and now made available on Xbox 360 and PS3 – and promises to be “the most action-packed and feature rich NINJA GAIDEN game ever created.” The game whole-heartedly delivers on both of these accounts. Yet there is another hidden promise that will challenge your patience as much as your skill. That promise, my friends, is defeat.

The back of the box boasts “brutal, high speed action” – a worthy call to adventure for any seasoned gamer with an edge to maintain or just something to prove. With any given game, I am one of those try-hard cheevo hunters quickly thrilled by the lure of such arrogantly challenging gameplay. “Insane” is my de facto difficulty and I rarely look for the easy way out.

With those tenants in mind, the modern Ninja Gaiden series has occupied an honored place on my list of challenging titles for the better part of a decade. But when Ninja Gaiden 3 was first released in early 2012, there was much controversy (especially among old-school fans of the series) surrounding the exclusion of core content for the sole purpose of marketing it as DLC. The game’s only “free” melee weapon, for instance, was Hayabusa’s katana. Fan favorites like the Eclipse Scythe and Falcon’s Talons were brazenly made available at launch for an additional cost (each). Coupled with a relative lack of polish, the original bare-bones incarnation of Ninja Gaiden 3 – with its vapid DLC offerings – became one to avoid.

So you can imagine the shared excitement that began to build around the announcement of a remastered, reduced-price release that would not only feature all DLC content, but would be packed to the brim with NEW weapons, abilities, playable characters, game modes, a revised skill system and more. As the story goes, Hayashi-san and the crew at Team Ninja were pretty upset by the lackluster reception of the initial release. Razor’s Edge was their chance to win back a legion of fans that may have lost that lovin’ feelin’ for the aging hack-and-slash series. I think they succeeded in catering to their fans’ needs. Yet beyond the copious amount of fan service and added value is a game that still suffers from core design and mechanical issues to an extremely frustrating degree.

If anything can be said for Razor’s Edge, it is – unequivocally – an adrenaline-fueled slaughter fest. I found myself pushed to my physical limits as a gamer like never before. Allow me to set the stage: The legendary ninja Ryu Hayabusa has been summoned to face a terrorist menace known as the Regent of the Mask, who curses our hero with “the Grip of Murder.” This spell, which feeds itself on revenge, threatens to consume Ryu before he can shut down the Regent and his cabal of terrorist pals. It’s a threadbare plot with just enough Eastern tropes and genre staples to sufficiently string together the action. It’s not the most inspired tale, and if you’re looking for the next storytelling phase of 21st century Ninja Gaiden you won’t find it here. Yet, with its extreme dismemberment and appropriately foul-mouthed enemies, Razor’s Edge earns a solid (and much-appreciated) “M for Mature.”

Razor’s Edge has five difficulty settings, or as the game refers to them, “play styles.” As stated, I prefer a challenge; so I launched into Razor’s Edge on Hard armed with the knowledge that upon completion I’d unlock “Master Ninja Difficulty” (with “Ultimate Ninja Difficulty” after that). 225 achievement points out of 1000 are tied up in these difficulty settings, which demand a commitment of no fewer than three complete playthroughs of the game.

A worthy challenge.

The action was immediately fast and furious. The game’s revised mechanics were easily adapted and the litany of combo moves is constantly at your disposal. As you defeat enemies, you gain karma, the currency you use to level up Ryu’s abilities, weapons and Ninpo (read: ninjutsu super-moves). When I hit the first level boss, the Regent of the Mask himself, I was in for a rude awakening. Although I may have had the skill to win, I simply didn’t have the statistics. I ran that boss battle ran for hours until I came up with a specific set of combo moves powerful and dexterous enough for me to survive. The sheer amount of enemy damage output versus my ability to dodge and absorb it was insurmountable.

But against all odds I pushed through to the next level. I thought I’d hit the bell curve and surpassed it with flying colors. And with a steady flow of karma on the way, it could only be up from here. Boy, was I wrong. Different boss encounters proved equally as strenuous as the first. I was in such a state of alert button-mashing hyper-focus, I managed to work up a sweat over another few hours of trial and error on the second stage boss. I actually began to stink from stewing in my own juices. This was the kind of gameplay you’d only heard about in schoolyard legend. Or was it? Was I simply not good enough? Or was the level of precision needed to survive these encounters uncanny, almost mechanically inhuman?

The only diagnosis I could reach was that you’re not meant to play on hard the first time (which increases the required number of playthroughs for completion to four). There’s no way around it: you need those upgraded stats and abilities to comfortably make it a go, challenge be damned. You could make a good argument that such a situation increases the replay value of the game. But personally, in the midst of a season littered with AAA titles at 60 bucks a pop, such a commitment seems unreasonable to me for a relatively shallow hack-and-slash action title like Razor’s Edge. Ultimately, the gameplay and story that hold it up don’t possess the depth to foster that kind of replay value. And the satisfaction of completion isn’t much of a reward. The effort, while noble, was lost due to simple – yet critical – imbalance.

As for being “feature rich,” Razor’s Edge is among the most robust packages in recent memory. If you’re a fan of the series or action games in general, Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor’s Edge offers an extraordinarily large dose of gameplay features (despite my heavy distaste for the game’s mechanical shortcomings and maddening imbalance issues).

They did right by the fans and pumped Razor’s Edge full of new weapons, including those that originally had to be purchased separately as DLC. There are three new playable characters: Ayane, Momiki and Kasumi (guest star hotties from Dead or Alive and Hayabusa’s past). And the ninja skill/karma system is a refreshing addition to the game’s infrastructure. But, as I maintain, that infrastructure is broken.

The game looks and sounds as polished as other recent Team Ninja titles like Dead or Alive 5 and does little to alter the rather straight-forward current generation art style they forged back in 2004. This doesn’t detract from the experience, but it doesn’t add much either. Despite the adequacy of the game’s visuals and the elegant art direction behind them, there remained a pervasive feeling of “I’ve seen this before.”

“Ninja Cinema” allows you to view the game’s cutscenes in a theatre setting. And “Shadows of the World” allows you to compete against other unknown ninjas in multiplayer combat. This highly customizable counterpart to the single-player campaign excited me – not only for the unique challenge competitive online multiplayer can offer, but for that extra bit of content that could help Razor’s Edge live up to its claims.

However, during the majority of my attempts, the servers for “Shadows of the World” were virtual ghost towns. There weren’t enough players to get a game going. And when I did slide into a match, I was grossly outranked and outgunned by the other players. Simply put, my level 1 ninja would never compete with a level 25 ninja because of the tremendous imbalance in player arsenal and power. It doesn’t matter how quick, smart, or instinctive you may be – you can’t compete in Razor’s Edge multiplayer if you’re outranked by more than a few levels. There is no learning curve; it’s a slaughterhouse. Unlike more traditional competitive multiplayer titles like Call of Duty or Madden, Razor’s Edge doesn’t provide a level playing field. This only supports the fundamental imbalance at the core of the game that destroyed the single-player experience for me as well. Coupled with the empty server issue, Ninja Gaiden multiplayer was – if I may – D.O.A.

For as “action packed” and “feature laden” as it is, Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor’s Edge suffers from a lack of balance and will no doubt be a source of frustration for those who try to go against its painful grain. I liked the game, but it stands in the face of philosophies that are too strong to ignore. Challenges must be surmountable, and their rewards must feel adequate. That just wasn’t a feeling I got from this Ninja Gaiden. But if you can get past these hangups, or if they somehow please you, Razor’s Edge offers a whole lot of game in a low-priced package. Let’s just say I’m looking forward to what’s next for Team Ninja and Ryu Hayabusa.

+ The girls of Ninja Gaiden and D.O.A.

+ Full of improved features

- Loads of imbalance

- Poorly redefines “challenge”

6.5 / 10

In 2011, Dead Island caused quite a stir with its debut trailer featuring the struggles of a beautiful family mauled by zombies (some in bikinis). It was an emotional showcase of the true horror a zombie-infested world can have on just a small group of people, and it suggested a game that focused on the human condition and survival. What we received instead was an open world hack-and-slash with enemies that just happen to be zombies, navigating a world filled with bugs not of the undead variety. This time around Dead Island veterans considering Riptide know exactly what they’re getting into, but the extent of the resemblance to the original may not be to everyone’s liking.

Deep Silver has been careful not to market Riptide as a sequel to the series, and it’s easy to see why: it plays very much like Dead Island version 1.5. Not much has progressed since we last saw our survivors; they have left the island of Banoi and land on an aircraft carrier occupied by military personnel that soon start treating everyone like lab rats. One misunderstanding and bite later the virus is onboard, giving the survivors a chance to overrun their captives and escape.

They land on the island of Palanoi, where the virus has also spread among its residents. Once again, the survivors are tasked with protecting the remaining uninfected and finding a way off the island. The story is bland at best, but it follows suit with the first game’s plot, so at least there’s consistency. And that’s the problem with Riptide, it follows everything that was right AND wrong with Dead Island that it’s hard to understand how so many problems made its way into this spinoff.

Riptide is a first-person action roleplaying game featuring an open world environment, or the attempts at one in yet another tropical setting. There are five classes to choose from, four of which fans of the original Dead Island are familiar with and a new individual named John who specializes in hand-to-hand combat. There’s an option to import your character from Dead Island if you want to carry over your unlocked skills and levels, though your battery-powered katana and barbed wired baseball bat won’t make the journey.  Despite your class selection, you are still able to wield any weapon you pick up, the difference lies in the special abilities made available in the characters’ skill trees.

Weapons are upgradable, and the fun aspect of finding mods and creating interesting weapon combinations is still alive and well. There are plenty of weapons and crafting items littered throughout Palanoi, all of different rarity. Likewise, melee weapons still deteriorate with much use, but weapons seem to last longer this time around and there are more workbenches available to repair broken items. The more you wield a type of weapon, the more proficient you now become in that category, granting longer durability for your weapons, faster attacks, etc.

Earning experience and money is accomplished by completing quests and defeating enemies. Like the first installment, Riptide has many sidequests available and collectibles to find. And like Dead Island, both the main story missions and sidequests boil down to boring fetch objectives, which require a significant amount of backtracking through areas of Palanoi that lack the expansive and tropical ambience of Banoi. There’s a blanket sense of urgency the game introduces at the beginning, but it all fades away when you’re tasked with running around finding random characters whose importance fades away after one cutscene.

Throughout your exploration you will encounter civilians who require your assistance, yelling for help in exchange for experience, weapons or money. Combat is very melee-centric, an aspect Dead Island is known for and that somehow remains just as buggy in this installment. Actions such as swinging weapons, running, kicking, and jumping are all tied to a stamina bar, a mechanic that should add to the survival horror feel the game is trying to accomplish but can easily frustrate the player. Zombies often times claw at you much faster than your character can swing, and when there’s three on you at any given moment, this makes fighting all the more excruciating.

If playing solo, prepare to be ambushed constantly, because Riptide does not scale down zombie encounters depending on your play style. What’s worse, zombies constantly respawn even after you clear an area, sometimes right behind you. There is an additional melee command implemented where you can attack a zombie from above to knock them down and stomp their face in, but this and other animations don’t always hit their mark. Melee is irregular and generally works against you, a troubling thought given how much of the combat depends on close encounters.

Thugs, Suiciders and Floaters return to make your day worse, but now they’re accompanied by new mutated zombie types called Screamers, Wrestlers, Grenadiers, Infected, etc. Screamers can inhabilitate you with their ear-shattering yells while the Infected pummel at you with twice the speed of a regular Walker (the garden variety zombie enemy), and because Riptide introduces boat transportation, you also have Drowners to deal with, zombies that will climb onto your ride while you’re trying to navigate through a swamp during a rain storm.

One noticeable addition to the Dead Island series is the use of fortifications when defending camps from hordes of zombies. Before a slew of enemies come knocking at your door, you have the opportunity to put up fences and set up gatling guns to help keep them at bay, an interesting concept that sadly doesn’t bring much to the table. Fences do very little to hold back the zombies, and having to put them back up is usually more trouble than it’s worth. This is coupled with having to save the other camp occupants from being killed by the enemy — while nearby NPCs watch them struggle only inches away. If you complete sidequests for these characters before the horde segments, the survivors become stronger to better assist in these hectic moments. Still, you’ll be tasked to save a couple of them when things get rough.

Co-op is Dead Island‘s main attraction, and this remains true in Riptide. The game is significantly more enjoyable with partners to aid you, especially during hordes, though this seems more a testament to your friends than the game itself. Friends no longer have to worry about each other’s progression or level in the game, anyone can join at any point in the story and enemies are now leveled to your stats, making for a better cohesive co-op experience. You can only revive friends if you happen to have a medkit, but respawning happens relatively quickly and the only penalty is the lost of currency. That said, respawning is spotty; just like enemies can randomly appear out of thin air in front of you, so can you appear behind a zombie the second you respawn (and remember, they have a better sense of awareness than you).

There have been quite a few mentions to the buggy state of the game, and for good reason. There are too many glitches I personally encountered to list them all, but some of the more significant drawbacks include dropped framerate (to a point that the game simply stopped working), zombies clipping through walls, primary objectives not appearing until the checkpoint was reloaded, and there’s the moment in the first ten minutes of my playthrouh where I found myself stuck in a room with two unopenable doors. It took me awhile to realize I wasn’t supposed to be in that room, though I arrived there by the game’s own doing, as I was pushed back by a gust of wind and suddenly I was trapped. There were even moments when a random player would join only to freeze the game, then my console.

The character models for the survivors still remain creepy to look at, with not much improvement graphically. Their personalities unfortunately remain absent. However, I do want to commend Techland for their variety of zombie designs; enemies have a more diversified look than most zombie games I’ve played. Weapons themselves change with usage: starting from clean, sharp edges to rusted, blood-covered blunt objects after a good round of zombie hacking.

The main campaign should take you about fifteen hours to complete, but coupled with sidequests this can easily equal up to a twenty-five hour adventure. Whether or not you’ll enjoy that adventure depends on your love for the first game, and the friends you bring along for the slaughter. Dead Island: Riptide doesn’t fix what’s broken with the original, which is odd given the amount of details that desperately need to be repaired. The concept of an open world zombie survival game is still good on paper, but somehow Techland has failed for a second time to make sure it works in execution. At least there is one trait I can commend: “Who Do You Voodoo” is still entertaining to hear when the credits roll.

— Game breaking bugs from the first game still present
— Fetch quests make up the majority of the campaign
+ Can be a tolerable experience with friends

5.5 / 10

If you’ve been patiently waiting for the day you can simultaneously morph into a Mexican wrestler and a chicken, DrinkBox Studios is happy to cater to your unique taste. Guacamelee! is a charming adventure that feasibly could have stumbled into the realms of the distasteful, but its lighthearted and respectful approach to Mexican culture makes this game a noteworthy downloadable purchase. The journey, while short, is a memorable experience riddled with allusions to other games and memes, demonstrating the developer’s love for their colleagues’ accomplishments and appreciation of the culture in which it belongs.

A poor agave farmer named Juan is preparing for El Dia de Los Muertos (the Day of the Dead) when he is called to action upon the kidnapping of the intelligent and beautiful woman known (ironically) only as the President’s daughter, a childhood friend for whom Juan secretly yearns. The culprit is Carlos Calaca, ruler of the dead, who thinks it’s about time to merge Earth with the underworld, with the President’s daughter a centerpiece of his ritual. Juan bravely stands in opposition to the skull king in a pitiful attempt that costs him his life. He’s given a second a chance at life upon finding the legendary luchador mask, granting him the capabilities of a great wrestler; he sets off on his quest to save the nameless damsel and defeat the evils of the afterlife.

A simplistic goal rests at the core of Guacamelee!, but that in no means dictates the experience the game bestows. Guacamelee! is an action platformer glossed with a vibrant yet gentle coat of Mexican folk art. The game is stunning in both character design and environments, achieving that warm Latin flare even when the world is dark and gloomy.

A collection of trumpets, acoustic guitars and string instruments—minus any voice work—accompany the captivating scenery of deserts, forests, and pueblos (towns) full of rainbow streamers and traditional stonewall houses. The world’s inhabitants are exaggerated versions of a few Mexican tropes that manage to entertain rather than insult, especially when the NPCs are talking Spanglish (English and Spanish colloquialism). The careful execution of the Mexican theme is no accident, given how the primary concept for the game was brought up by one of the animators, Augusto, as homage to his native land.

As a luchador your available attack moves include uppercuts, suplexes and piledrivers. However, special moves like uppercuts use up your limited supply of stamina, so combat involves the execution of regular punches and jump combos. With each KO’d opponent you absorb orbs that grant health and money to be used at altars littered throughout levels that also work as checkpoints. The in-game store has a small selection of available upgrades like chunks that increase Juan’s health or stamina, however, the quantity of available moves is quite minimal; the game depends more on the skills acquired through its adventure in order to advance. With each new area you gain a new ability, which is only earned after Juan destroys precious statues that belong to an old man with an affinity of transforming into a goat (don’t we all?). The acquired moves definitely assist in combat, but it’s their use in level progression where these skills truly matter.

Guacamelee! does a wonderful job of combining new attack upgrades with platform progression to stay true to its metroidvania inspiration; you use newly acquired moves to jump to ledges once beyond your reach or to break colored blocks that can only be destroyed by a specific ability. The moves themselves aren’t unique or impressive; they boil down to stronger punches tailored to different directions (uppercuts punch up and frog slams direct elbow force downward), but they’re integrated well with the platforming aspect of the game.

The range of enemies Juan has the liberty to knock out are adequate for a game as small as Guacamelee!, with dragons shooting projectiles while armadillos roll into you, and swift skeletons slice and dice. Even when the game begins spawning the same enemies, it amps the action by having these enemies protected by shields only breakable with your special moves. At any given time you can have three enemies with three different colored shields attacking from all sides, so timing and execution is key.

That said, while the combat was indeed fun and responsive, it would have benefitted from being more reactive after a combo. Often I found myself smashing a string of buttons three times, having Juan pause for a second or two to then continue his onslaught, which then stalled combat when facing four enemies or more at once. It was especially difficult given the animation when Juan is knocked out. The few seconds it would take Juan to get back up could have him knocked back down and lose precious life. Yet the game is gracious with its checkpoints should you fall in battle, and immediately respawns you to a platform if you failed to reach the next one.

Of course, if you do find yourself stuck on a particular platform, it may be time to turn into a chicken and find an alternative route. Yes, in Guacamelee! you can transform into poultry, and I’m convinced this is a feature all games should start incorporating into their design. As a chicken you traverse pathways too small for a bulky luchador, and you can even peck an enemy to death if you feel brave enough.

Not soon after receiving your chicken morphing powers, you earn the ability to switch between Calaca’s skeleton world and the living realm. This upgrade brings new challenges, as you constantly switch between dimensions to jump on the proper platforms to make it over a row of spikes or buzzsaws. Having just played Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams, a game that incorporates a similar idea, I was enthralled with the concept but not so impressed with its execution. There were quite a few incidents where the game demanded a certain level of dexterity I couldn’t keep up with, making for some rather frustrating times. Those events were few and far between, but there’s enough backtracking in the game to make them noticeable. Nevertheless, the dimension switching is quite enjoyable when certain enemies can only be attacked when in specific worlds, making combat a fast-paced and thrilling occurrence.

The legendary mask bestowed to Juan wouldn’t be legendary without a guardian, and she goes by the name of Tostada. This is a character to accompany Juan on his adventure, playable as a co-op partner, though this actually doesn’t add much to the overall experience. In particular, the platforming segments require a certain amount of precision tough for two players cannot to coordinate. The second player has the option to hover around as a ball of light if the platforming is best done by a single person, but then it’s just best to avoid co-op altogether. If you want to play the game alone on the go, you can do that, because once you purchase the PlayStation 3 version, you receive a free Vita copy with the option to cross save and cross play.

Guacamelee! has its fair share of piñatas, chickens and goat wizards, but an extra touch that Drinkbox includes in the game’s decor truly deserves a mention. It won’t take you long to notice something oddly familiar about a wrestling promo in Juan’s hometown, even if you have no idea what ‘Super Hermanos’ means in English (hint: the promo has men in red and green tights). These callouts are sprawled throughout the game, and they’re sure to make you smile every time you spot one.

Not only does Guacamelee! make shoutouts to great retro and indie games before it, the team has managed to cleverly incorporate memes into the game’s settings almost as a long-form inside joke. We all frequent reddit and share memes enough to know that it’s embedded in our gaming culture, and to see these developers are just as enthralled in those customs gives Guacamelee! a personal connection to the player.

Guacamelee! is an eccentric adventure in the world of skull candy decor and ‘pollo’ power, spanning between five and eight hours depending on your commitment to achievements. The heart that went into developing Guacamelee! is evident in its execution and reverence to other works. Serving as a suitable take on the metroidvania subgenre, Guacamelee! is a game that manages to hold a player’s attention to the very end. If anything, remember this: you can transform into a chicken.

+ Good execution in combat and platforming using the same mechanics
+ Wonderful ambience honoring Mexican and gamer heritage
— Dimension switching mechanics don’t work well when platforming

8 / 10

NetherRealm Studios brings us another great fighter with Injustice: Gods Among Us, making important improvements to—but maintaining the core of—its last successful outing, Mortal Kombat. It feels good to play a great fighting game with some of the most iconic DC comic book super heroes and villains. This is definitely not another Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe, nor is it Mortal Kombat‘s 9.5. Injustice: Gods Among Us feels like a completely new fighting game with an awesome storyline and a ton of content for DC Comics fans to salivate over. But given the abundance of fighting games released last year—and the recent announcements of balance changes coming to Super Street Fighter IV AE—does it offer enough to attract core fighting game players to yet another game, alongside DC fans no doubt clamoring for the opportunity to wade in with their favorites?

It’s a fair question to ask whether the NetherRealm connection will make the gameplay similar, maybe too similar, to Mortal Kombat. Well, it is and it isn’t. If you played the most recent Mortal Kombat you’ll find that some of the fighting game mechanics are similar in IGAU, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. For instance, simple button combinations are used to string attacks together into combos. The button layout consists of Light, Medium, and Heavy attacks. So a ground combo can be performed by pressing Light, Light, and Medium, followed by a special move in most cases. These combos don’t feel like you have to be too strict with frame timing as you would in Street Fighter, making executing those special moves more accessible to a slightly more casual audience. IGAU also offers a super meter that can be used to extend your combos, add extra damage to your special moves, and unleash Super Moves. These Super Moves are your most damaging attack. You execute this by pressing the Meter Burn button and Stance button together once you have a full super meter. Yes, the Stance button, also from Mortal Kombat, is back. This button is used to show off both sides of your character. There could be a hidden reason to use this button but so far I’ve only used it to make my character dance.

Now you can’t be a superhero without super-human abilities, and those are executed using the Power button. This is indicated by a small icon or meter located right next to the super meter. This ability recharges over time for some characters and can be used multiple times in a match. The Power ability of course differs for each character. Superman is granted extra strength, Batman deploys Batarangs, and Wonder Woman switches from her lasso stance to her shield and sword stance. This opens up more in-depth gameplay when it comes to dishing out damaging combos.

How else can you show that you’re stronger than the average human being? How about having the ability to smash someone over the head with a car? Well in IGAU you use your surroundings to your advantage with interactive objects. You can set opponents on fire by activating jet engines. You can also get yourself out of tough spots by interacting with objects located conveniently in the corners of the stage. If timed correctly with other attacks, you can even work the interactive objects into combos as well. This makes each battle consistently exciting and supplies that feeling of controlling a character with truly extraordinary strength. There’s simply something satisfying about blowing up your opponent with a self-propelled missile.

Supporting the interactive objects are stage transitions. If you hit with a stage transition attack you send your opponent crashing through buildings, trains and other hazards, ending in a totally different location within the stage. All these added aspects of environmental change haven’t worked too effectively in other fighting games, but IGAU makes the transitions dramatic and character appropriate without interfering with the flow of the match.

The story mode is set up almost exactly the same as Mortal Kombat. Each chapter covers a particular character for that point in the story. So yes, you are forced to play with characters you may not want to play with, but it’s still a great way to experience the well-crafted story.

I don’t what to say too much to spoil the storyline, but Superman is extremely pissed, and for good reasons. NetherRealm and DC Comics evidently worked closely together to ensure that the DC universe held up to the lore of characters—as you know fans would be livid if canon was ignored. While more casual DC fans may not be familiar with characters such as Shazam and Hawk Girl, compared to Superman and Batman, but the story mode is strong enough to spark interest to find out more about them and the Justice League. And true DC Comics aficionados will not be disappointed by all the fan service.

Time and again I’ve said that a functional online experience is vital to a fighting game, and IGAU has delivered just that. While playing online (even before official release day) I was able to find a match without much effort. The gameplay was smooth with very little to no lag. Load times while searching for an online match may be an issue, but that’s pure speculation at this point.

Single-player game modes include S.T.A.R. Lab Missions, which gives you tons of challenges to complete. These tasks involve saving people from villains by blasting projectiles with Superman’s eye lasers, or dodging cream pies and chattering teeth bombs thrown by Joker and Harley. The challenges really don’t focus on head-to-head combat but are more like mini-games that add a great amount of replay value to the overall experience. This game mode should remind you of the Challenge Tower in Mortal Kombat.

IGAU also offers a simple and very comprehensive Tutorial mode that takes you through basic movement all the way to advanced techniques, so everything you need to know about the games is covered. Also packaged with this tutorial mode is a robust Training mode that supplies all the options you need to be the best super hero you can. While in Training mode you can examine details like your character’s frame data if you want to get down to the nuts and bolts. Understanding what attacks are safe, when, and which aren’t, and when, is vital information in the competitive scene, so shows the potential for IGAU to be figured in that arena.

In conclusion, IGAU is a very solid fighting game. The character animations feel a little stiff and their movement sluggish at first, but after a couple of hours the timing and speed of the gameplay becomes more apparent. The visuals are universally great with detailed character models featuring natty costumes and appropriate attention to detail. The storyline really should appeal to DC Comics experts and novices alike for its tale of superhero battles. IGAU shows promise that it has what it takes to be deemed as a true competitive fighter no matter how many fighting games were released last year.

+ Iconic DC Comic Super Heroes and Villains
+ Great gameplay mechanics with interactive environments
+ Functional Online mode
- Characters movement seems a little stiff/Online load times

8.5 / 10

Remaking a classic video game is tricky work. Developers have to capture the essence of the title that made it popular many years back, while updating it to fit the norms and requirements of modern video games. No matter how good the remake may be, some fans will inevitably scoff at the blasphemy the developer has bestowed upon their beloved franchise. Some of these remakes are excellent, such as 2012’s Double Dragon: Neon, a wonderful blend of cooperative combat, cheesy humor, and 80’s flair with great appeal to both old fans and new gamers. And then there are games like Double Dragon II: Wander of the Dragons that has so little in common with the source material and it’s riddled with utterly broken game design that it’s a disgrace to those that enjoyed any previous Double Dragon game.

I bring up Double Dragon: Neon to clarify a few important details. In no way is Wander of the Dragons related to Neon. The two games are made by entirely different developers and have drastically varied gameplay and storylines. Not only that, but Neon is one of the best games I played in 2012, and Wander of the Dragons is one of the worst games I have ever played.

What makes Wander of the Dragons so bad is its total rejection of any semblance that this is a Double Dragon game aside from the title. The game is supposedly a remake of the arcade/NES title Double Dragon II: The Revenge but looks, feels, and plays nothing like the original.

After witnessing the murder of their lover Marian, brothers Billy and Jimmy Lee set out for revenge. The Billy and Jimmy I remember were masters of hand-to-hand combat, but the Billy and Jimmy in this game are masters of monotony. Both brothers play identically, meaning no matter which you choose you’re subjected to mindless button mashing to deliver the same five-hit punch and/or kick combos. The fundamental aspect of a beat-em up is combat, and the fighting in Wander of the Dragons is the most mundane, boring combat I’ve ever had the displeasure of playing.

Unlike the original game, Wander of the Dragons takes place on a 3D plane, thus you can attack enemies in more directions. Unfortunately this works poorly in conjunction with the combat. Billy and Jimmy are often surrounded by enemies from many sides, and an action as simple as turning around becomes a huge ordeal. Before turning completely you take a quick back step and then rotate. I don’t want to back up, I want to turn around! Even lining up in front of your opponent to land a hit becomes a challenge.

Enemies are just as dull as Billy and Jimmy, you have to fight the same three or four enemies the entire game. Thankfully these fodder enemies are incredibly stupid. They run into battle as a group, then huddle around you and attack one at a time. Enemy AI is undoubtedly horrendous, but making matters worse is how unfair the game is. As you try to get back up after getting knocked down a different enemy can whack you again and cause you to fall once more. This gets repeated until you ultimately die. Moreover, some bosses and sub-bosses relentlessly attack you, making it literally impossible to get back up! In these cases your only saving grace is that your enemy will start their attack before you get up, or you get lucky and land a quick blow upon standing.

Wander of the Dragons truly has the worst gameplay I have seen in a long time (For comparison, see: Last Rebellion).

As the title suggests you wander around a few different locales en route to the final showdown at the secret hideout. Backgrounds are a mixed bag, offering some cool set pieces like a Wild West themed town, which are easily the best part of the entire game. For every interesting zone there are two boring stages. The most egregious of these levels is the laboratory, which repeats the same test tube backgrounds over and over again. I was disappointed to see relatively good levels followed more often than not by less inspired ones.

The soundtrack follows suit with the visuals, offering some good elements but mostly bad. The background music is on the low end of passable, with a few tunes fitting the scene (again, the western themed level stands out), but more often than not it’s a terrible mix of beats and sounds. The one exception to the poor soundtrack comes at the very beginning of the game: the theme song that plays while starting is a nice remix of the theme of the original game. Sound effects, like the music, also fall flat, with generic whacks accompanying each hit. Everything about the game looks and sounds subpar, and overall the game suffers.

A two player co-op mode is available for local play, and the only online feature is a leaderboard for high scores. Survival mode has you facing waves of enemies with only one life, which is a complete joke considering how terrible the gameplay is. Rounding out the available modes is a Vs. option that lets you and a friend duke it out against one another. With no online play, no additional features, and absolutely no reason to go back and play the game again, the replayability of Wander of the Dragons is zero. Usually beat-em ups are all about the replay value. The fact that this game has none should tell you a lot about the quality.

I want to stress this point again: Double Dragon: Wander of the Dragons has nothing to do with the excellent Double Dragon: Neon. Wander of the Dragons is a pitiful remake of a classic game and a damn shame for gamers. Double Dragon II on the NES deserves a better remake than this. Broken gameplay, boring combat, and no replay value make this one of the worst games I’ve played.

- Boring, broken, repetitive gameplay
- No replay value
- The only connection to Double Dragon is the title. This is a terrible remake!

2 / 10

Talking about Defiance is more difficult than you’d think. When the term “MMO” is thrown around, people tend to hear the silent “RPG” on the end. That term has become synonymous with the World of Warcraft template of grinding experience, leveling up, finding colored gear, and so on. While Defiance has those aspects in a manner of speaking, it uses them all so differently that you should expel that comparison from your mind. Defiance is not an RPG, but describing what it is will take some doing.

The best way I can think to illustrate Defiance’s unique character is to iterate through what it has in common with traditional MMOs and then explain what makes Defiance’s approach so unique. The easiest and most critical distinction is the game’s controls; Defiance plays like a normal third-person shooter. This is no Tabula Rasa trickery either — you shoot bullets at enemies which either hit or miss depending on your mechanical skill at aiming. There are no action bars of skills and no consumable items, just two guns, one active skill, and one recharging grenade.

This is critical because every feature in Defiance builds on the simple fact that shooting is fun. Whether it’s NPC enemies or other players, emptying clips and racking up kills is satisfying like no other MMO I’ve played.

Defiance also has gear and levels, but the game doesn’t have the same vertical progression of player ability as traditional MMORPGs. Even though some numbers get bigger, you don’t necessarily get more powerful. Take leveling for example; the most consequential decision for your character’s abilities happens in the first hour of the game. This is when you pick your character’s active skill from a group of four including cloaking, a flat damage buff, an enemy-confusing decoy, and a speed boost that amps up your melee damage. From then on, you can only unlock or upgrade passive skills that subtly change your character’s performance. Your health doesn’t go up and your guns don’t suddenly do more damage. Leveling just gives you the ability to tune your character toward your play style.

The same is true for gear. A purple gun you get after playing for ten hours will be marginally better than your starting gear, but not so much that it trivializes any of the game’s encounters. As with the skill and leveling system, it’s simply about finding the gear that works with your play style, whether you want to shotgun enemies in the face or snipe them from a distance.

We’ve covered the gameplay and progression mechanics, so what do you actually do in Defiance? That’s a little weird too. Yes, there are quests and a story involving a socially maladjusted doctor and his magical alien doohickey, but since there’s no level grind to speak of, quests aren’t the tent-pole activity they usually are in MMOs.

At least the quests themselves are structurally familiar. Most boil down to “shoot some guys, then touch a glowing thing for a bit.” Occasionally you will shoot some guys while someone else touches the glowing thing for a bit. The quest design isn’t profound, but I do love the quests’ wide-open nature. At any time, another player can walk up and help you out with the quest. Once complete, you both get credit for finishing it. It’s as simple as that.

Impromptu co-operation also occurs at the Arkfalls, which are spontaneous PvE boss fights that randomly drop around the game world. Once one begins, players converge to blast away waves of enemies, vying for scoreboard pride as well as a smattering of the game’s currencies. These fights are absurd, and running through a battlefield immolated from recurring explosions and gunfire is an incredible experience. I haven’t experienced the full-tilt chaos of these events in any other MMO, not to mention the spontaneous car meet-up that happens after as everyone summons their sweet whips to head off to their next adventure.

Player vs. player options are surprisingly solid as well, thanks to the mostly-level playing ground afforded by the previously described horizontal progression mechanics. These matches come in two flavors: simple 8v8 team deathmatch or massive 64v64 capture-and-hold matches. Both capitalize on the game’s solid shooting mechanics very well and put a lot of emphasis around characters that are specced out to a specific combat role. While Defiance’s PvP is not immune from the glut of brainless shotgun users that plague any multiplayer shooter, it’s still fun and engrossing.

That’s the short list of what you can do in Defiance, and beyond that the game doesn’t provide a guiding hand. This was very confusing for me as a new player. Sure, there’s this map full of activities, but what do I do? What am I working towards?

It took me a while to accept this idea, but in Defiance you’re not working toward anything. You just sort of do… whatever. An average play session for me goes like this: I log in and do a quest. When I turn it in, I notice there’s an Arkfall happening 200 meters away. I drive over there and blow up a ton of bugs or robot men or whatever. I get some grenades and shields from that, so I drive back to the vendor to sell off my items and buy a new scope mod for my gun. I feel like taking the newly-modded gun for a spin, so I queue up for a PvP session and play a few of those. Defiance is fantastic at presenting you a world packed with activity and choice; it just takes some time to understand that you don’t need to plan your activity in service of a higher goal.

Defiance isn’t so fantastic at, well, working. This game is busted in ways beyond typical MMO launch jank. In addition to more expected errors like server instability and disconnects, there are other features that should work in a launch retail product but don’t. Some are glaring, like the fact that clan chat just doesn’t work. Additionally, the voice chat quality is terrible. If you want to turn off voice chat and use another service like Skype or Mumble, you can, but that option disables all text chat too. They’re not separate, which means the game’s chat is a complete ghost town.

On top of bugs and broken features, the UI in the game is a terrible, cluttered mess. Inventory screens are a pain to navigate and they don’t visually convey information efficiently at all. For instance, if you’re shopping for a gun mod, you have to click on each one to see what type of gun the mod is for. Another frequent annoyance of mine: if you have a gun equipped in any of your loadout slots, you can’t sell it or drop it. Cleaning your inventory is a time-consuming headache involving checking tabs of equipment over and over. The interface has a long, long way to go before it’s a constructive part of the game experience.

Let me be clear; Defiance is a fun game, but it’s also a very broken game. To Trion’s credit, they’ve already fixed some major issues in the week since launch (for instance, voice chat is actually intelligible now). I have faith that Trion will eventually get this game on the level. Just bear in mind that Defiance is more an investment in a work-in-progress than a mature, feature-complete game.

Even still, it’s testament to Defiance’s unique and free-flowing nature that the game’s numerous bugs don’t actively deter me from the game. So what if I timed out of my PvP queue, I see a badass stunt ramp that is just begging for it. While Trion has to be held accountable for the severe problems at launch, the truth is that the game’s experience is strong enough to shine through them. Unless you need an artificial goal like a level cap to work towards in an MMO, Defiance offers some of the best fun you can have online.

+ Open, free-flowing game experience
+ Stunt ramps
- Numerous bugs, stability issues

7.5 / 10

A game by sadists, for sadists.

The long-awaited follow-up to the medieval parody beat ‘em-up, Castle Crashers, BattleBlock Theater is a pure platformer in that the main attraction is the core gameplay itself. The main motivation that pushes you forward is the satisfaction of knowing you’re beating the game. It’s not for the faint of heart, and it made me want to punch the TV more than a few times. Despite that, BattleBlock Theater is a fantastic game, and you should buy it, play it, and invite your friends to play it with you, so you can all revel in your shared misery.

BattleBlock Theater’s premise isn’t too deep: you and your hundreds of travelling companions were having fun on a long boat trip, led by the mysteriously charismatic Hatty Hattington—who doesn’t wear a hat. When the boat is swept up in a monstrous storm, it crashes on a creepy island overrun with giant cats. Hatty is abducted by those giant cats, and they put a creepy hat on his head—now he has a hat. From there, Hatty’s no longer your friend: he forces you to participate in a hellish theatrical performance that looks a lot like a videogame platformer.

What the game has you do is similarly uncomplicated: collect at least three of seven gems scattered throughout each level and find the exit. The paces you’re put through in pursuit of that goal, however, are where Battleblock tests your mettle. In addition to regular, basic blocks, each 2D level is made up of increasingly more complicated and treacherous components: exploding blocks, disappearing-reappearing blocks, spiked blocks, laser blocks, spring-loaded platforms, plenty of water (in which you drown), and more. There are plenty of other hazards, like robots that spit homing missiles at you, cat soldiers armed with weapons who you’ll have to kill through melee and weapon-based combat, weird marching birds that swallow you and fart you to new locations shortly before they explode…the list goes on.

Conveniently, death has no real meaning aside from being a temporary setback. You have unlimited lives in pursuit of your gems, but when you die (not if, but when), you’re spawned at your last checkpoint, sometimes on the complete other side of the level, sometimes only a step away. Like Super Meat Boy before it, Battleblock Theater’s only real goal is to see how much punishment you can stand before you decide to throw the controller away and pour yourself a drink. It’s maddening.

But, just like Super Meat Boy, Battleblock is never cheap or unfair in its tortures. When you die, it’s your fault for not paying attention to your surroundings, or for missing a jump, or for moving just a shade too far to the left, so you need to do it again. And again. And again.

But the act of finding hidden gems, or gems that put you in harm’s way, or balls of yarn (which are rarer and can be spent on weapons), or transporters to secret levels is all far too much fun to really stop playing for very long. And when you finish a level, the feeling of relief and satisfaction at having conquered it is profound, and will keep you coming back for more (or will keep you crying, reaching for the bottle once again …either way).

The story campaign is broken into eight acts, comprised of nine different scenes, plus three optional encores and one mandatory finale per act, which is the same kind of torturous experience, but with a time limit. So if you’re not on top of your game and tend to panic under pressure (like me!) you’ll be cursing, dying, and starting over…a lot. The story can also be played cooperatively with a partner, either online or local. And the co-op levels are actually subtly different from the solo levels, made specifically for two players to tackle together, heightening its replay value, and keeping veterans on their toes.

The multiplayer options in Battleblock Theater don’t stop there, offering a fully functional level creator and editor, as well as loads of competitive “arena” modes like King of the Hill, Soul Stealer (which is similar to tag or capture the flag), timed races, and more. While the single-player game’s torture started to wear me out, I was reinvigorated by the multiplayer games. I delighted in using a rotary fan to blow my opponent off the “hill” to her death—or, even better, blowing her fireballs back into her face and setting her ablaze. Watching each of us die repeatedly created some kind of sick pleasure in me, and I knew that BattleBlock Theater had finally cemented its grip on my psyche. My frustration gave way to joy at each new challenge, and each new spike-block. From pain came happiness.

Like I said: this is a game for sadists. And now I’m one of them.

The entire experience is amplified by the ever-present narrator, whose quavering voice—supplied by Will Stamper—goads you onward and laughs at your every demise. Stamper also narrates each act’s puppet show-styled cut scenes, all of which are hilarious and worth multiple watches. The game’s entire aesthetic, from Stamper’s performance to the gruesome cartoon violence, to the incredibly fun and infectious music, is one of the major draws at work here. Even if you hate platformers and are easily frustrated, simply watching someone play BattleBlock Theater is plenty entertaining.

Even still, it’s not quite perfect. Despite the impressive armory you’ll earn throughout the story campaign, you have to enter a pause menu to change weapons, despite the fact that the four shoulder buttons on the controller only have three gameplay functions mapped to them. I don’t see why one of the less important functions couldn’t have been relegated to the completely unused select button, opening two buttons to cycle weapons. Moreover, you can’t change or customize control schemes, which is a bit disappointing.

The playable characters—specifically their lack of gameplay differences—is another missed opportunity. The game has hundreds of unlockable faces you can customize your character with, but changing faces is merely cosmetic. I know giving bonuses or penalties for each face would’ve been tough given how many there are to unlock. But players have a choice of only four different face shapes that each could’ve had different characteristics. The four different knights of Castle Crashers had their own powers and bonuses; I’m not sure why the same basic mechanic couldn’t have been implemented here. The bigger problem is that of motivation: I’d be even more energized to keep going if I knew I could unlock a character that offered new or unique styles of play. Instead, the unlocking component seems cursory, and not very important.

Of course, those are relatively minor quibbles compared to the excellence of the rest of the game. With so many different gameplay options, and the ability to make your own levels to put your friends through your own custom hell, BattleBlock Theater was worth the wait. It took me a little while to come around—and I’m still not entirely convinced that I’m not suffering from some form of Stockholm syndrome—but I’m happy to be a prisoner on creepy cat island for as long as they’ll keep torturing me. Don’t ever stop, you creepy, orange things.

+ Challenging, maddening levels and robust gameplay possibilities

+ Hilarious narration and overall aesthetic

- No control scheme options or weapon swap buttons 

8.5/10

My Google searches of Emma Watson had to be put on hold when I first heard that Visceral Games, of Dead Space fame, were working on the next entry in the Army of Two series, to be titled The Devil’s Cartel.  Fans, myself included, were stunned when it was announced that the beloved tag-team of Salem and Rios were taking a back seat, with newcomers Alpha and Bravo leading the charge. I’m a huge fan of the series but questioned how EA/Visceral Games could do this. Those turn coat mother…………. Despite that apprehension I had to dive in to this new installment and find out if the new blood in the characters infused new life into the series.

Let me start off by saying I enjoyed the campaign even though it was linear and generic; it was fun in a 1980s action movie kind of way packed with over-the-top violence. Clocking in around eight hours you mostly move from one checkpoint to the next, shelling out extreme prejudice to the cartel. The overall storyline is very predictable; I had it figured out within the first hour. It picks up in the bloodthirsty streets of Mexico where Alpha and Bravo are members of Trans World Operations (TWO), ran by Salem and Rios. Alpha and Bravo are sent as bodyguards to protect a politician named Cordova who is attempting to bring down the drug cartel, La Guadana, run by a guy named Batista. Flashback to five years earlier, Alpha and Bravo are new recruits for TWO, trying to earn their masks. With the help of Salem and Rios the group rescues a girl named Fiona, but things get out of hand. Flash forward to present day where Fiona is a private military contractor and the three of you are on a mission to eliminate the cartel, Batista, and his lieutenant El Diablo.

Visceral Games was going for a darker, grittier approach this time around so gone is all the bro-love that made the Army of Two franchise what it is; no more high fives, no asking which Wu-Tang member was your favorite, no more sex with pandas talk. Periodically a glimpse of what was pops up, like Alpha and Bravo talking about Rios’ sisters, but those instances are few and far between. Maybe that’s why I was never really fully invested in Alpha and Bravo like I did Salem and Rios. I always played as Salem in the past, but with The Devil’s Cartel there’s no strong character arc to become vested in Alpha and Bravo; you’re just two gun-slinging guys. It’s a missed opportunity to establish these new characters and recognize that fans were distraught about Salem and Rios not being playable.

Gone are Heavies, replaced by Brutes, which are essentially the same thing! Gone are the sync’d shots, gone is Alice, handler for Salem and Rios for the first two games, although there is a mention of her towards the end of the game, so she’s not forgotten in the game storyverse. Gone is the feeling of being a private military contractor. In The 40^th Day you dealt with Morality Choices that gave you two options and then showed the consequences of those choices. Although it didn’t affect the story at all in The 40^th Day it could’ve been used here to tell more of a story and/or build upon the characters arcs of Alpha and Bravo.

Some improvements to the mechanics are evident; absent is the Gears of War style run, replaced by a more traditional running mechanic, a la clicking the left analog. Same goes for melee attacks; it’s now just a simple click of the right analog stick. Issuing orders is still effortless, executed through the D-Pad, the partner AI is more effective this time around but it’s still a dish best served with a human partner. I was put off with not being able to switch shoulders for my camera angles as it made it tough to shoot from cover on a handful of occasions. Speaking of cover, locking into cover could be a hassle sometimes; if you’re moving from cover to cover using the system, it works great, but if you’re attempting to jump into cover on your own, good luck. I found myself running to a car or a barricade trying to stick to cover, only to find out I had to be towards the edge of the object, not the middle, for the cover to be triggered. Also an evade maneuver would’ve been very much appreciated, especially when trying to avoid grenades. Leaving cover can get sticky at times; furthermore the enemies like to throw grenades as soon as you get into cover, reminiscent of the recently released Tomb Raider, leaving you sticking to cover far too long and being taken down by grenades far too often.

The old Agro Meter is out too, replaced by the new Overkill system, which can help you get out of sticky situations. As you perform co-op attacks and maneuvers, you accumulate points in the Overkill meter, the more cooperative the action, the more points you get, and the faster the meter fills. Once Overkill is triggered, either by you, your partner, or both, you’re basically in beast mode for a short period of time with massive amounts of fire power at your disposal. I really enjoyed going into Overkill mode and cleaning house on the rushing cartel members. Also, you get some sweet body dismemberment when laying waste to enemies or chucking grenades in a crowd of thugs.

The Devil’s Cartel is powered by the Frostbite 2 engine, which gives a boost in the graphics department, but more importantly it brings destructive environments to this franchise. Cover can and will be shot out, leaving you or the enemy exposed, making the cover-to-cover maneuvering system crucial to staying alive. It’s not just limited to cheap wooden boxes; if you have the fire power, you can shoot up buildings, cars, or a conveniently placed red canister.

Taking a page from the original game, The Devil’s Cartel allows you to customize your weapon and gear load outs after checkpoints are reached, where in the 40^th Day you were able to swap weapons on the fly by pulling up a turn dial. Additionally, the ability to equip and un-equip suppressors and scopes has been scrapped. You do earn cash for the upgrades during your missions depending on how well you perform out in the field; the more teamwork you use, the more dollars you earn. In typical Army of Two fashion there are lots of items to unlock from weapons, attachments, skins, gear, and masks, which you can create on your own if you choose. I was disappointed that you were only able to put skins on your pistol, not any attachments though.

Army of Two: The Devil’s Cartel only offers online co-op in terms of a multiplayer experience. You can host public or private games, but I experienced issues with the drop in/drop out co-op, usually resulting in a player not being able to join during a mission, only before a mission. I would’ve liked to have seen the Extraction Mode brought back this time around; it would’ve been awesome to have four-player co-op with Salem, Rios, Alpha, and Bravo.

Overall I enjoyed my time with The Devil’s Cartel, but it’s tough to look past certain gameplay problems like why for some reason every time I came to a checkpoint or a breach, I had to wait 10 seconds for the game to cycle over until I could proceed. Or why can’t I access Chuy and Baker, aka Boi Boy and B.o.B? If you pre-ordered the game, you were supposed to get access to the characters but I have yet to see them, and I pre-ordered it. But if you can get past a series of underwhelming features and gameplay decisions, you’ll see that Visceral Games has kept the core of Army of Two intact. And that alone should make fans and newcomers alike, very happy with this entry into the series.

+  Classic Army of Two over the top action

+  Lots of unlocks

-   No Salem and Rios; missing bromance

-   Linear/predictable storyline

7.5 / 10

When citing franchises that have revolutionized the videogame industry in the 1980’s, the first name everyone mentions is Nintendo’s most beloved iconic game: The Great Giana Sisters. It was a side-scrolling adventure featuring two sisters who collected gems, jumped on shells, and crushed bricks all while capturing the hearts of children everywhere. That is until Time Warp Productions and Rainbow Arts, the original creators of Super Mario Bros., decided to threaten Nintendo with legal action if their cloned game was not taken off the shelves… uh, something’s not right here.

Yes, the legacy of The Great Giana Sisters is one that’s marked by legal disputes and plagiarism, but it’s also a legacy that made the original Atari ST and Commodore 64 copies collector’s items. Despite its ugly history, Black Forest Games (which is comprised of veteran Spellbound Entertainment developers, a company founded by the creator of the Giana Sisters IP) wanted to breathe new life into the siblings, but with their own ideas this time. Thanks to Kickstarter and the community’s willingness to give second chances, we now have Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams to assess Black Forest Games’ promise of renovation.

Two sisters are sitting in their room, playing what I assume is Giana Sisters DS, when a floating diamond appears and opens a portal, sucking in one of the sisters, Maria. Giana jumps in after her and ends up teleporting into a dream world, where her sister has been kidnapped by a dragon (to give Peach a run for her money). You’re immediately introduced to the transformation system; Giana can manipulate her dreams and in doing so transform herself, introducing you to cute and punk Giana.

As punk Giana you’re in a serene environment with blooming flowers and vibrant plants everywhere, and you have the ability to dash, while morphing into cute Giana means you can jump and twirl in a gloomy scene dotted with dying trees and swamps. The transformation is the most important gameplay mechanic: enemies change appearances, certain platforms and gems become available, gates open, and deadly spikes can either appear or vanish. Switching between Giana’s personas is seamless; there’s no cooldown to slow you down. The soundtrack even shifts with your character choice, a remarkable blend of chiptune and rock instrumentals thanks to Chris Hülsbeck, Fabian Del Priore, and Machinae Supremacy.

Twisted Dreams is not a simple platformer; it demands you understand its mechanics quickly, though all the instructions are graphically demonstrated on wooden signs instead of explaining them in text form. The mechanics you learn in the first few stages are the only ones you will need in later portions; the game does a brilliant job of expanding on its basic mechanics as opposed to bombarding you with more complicated and unnecessary ones. Though the levels are challenging, the game is generous enough with its checkpoints, and you immediately respawn to try again… and again… and again.

As punk Giana her dash ability helps you smash through boulders, destroy enemies (rather than knocking them unconscious as cute Giana does), and bounce off walls—though I had the most trouble with that feature. Cute Giana’s twirl is important for slowly descending downwards. To beat a level you must reach a castle, once again poking fun at its Mario-clone origins. However, in order to unlock the boss stages, you must earn enough star ratings from previous levels. Hence, despite how forgivable the game is on death, dying too much can result in a low star rating, so you may need to redo the stage entirely.

As you progress through the levels, the game increasingly tests your dexterity, timing, and attentiveness. Boss levels push these attributes to the limit; the course you have to slog through before even reaching the big monster at the end are some of the more frustrating aspects of the adventure.

Every landscape is detailed and beautiful, especially when trekking along as punk Giana. The way Giana’s transformations blend the two worlds together is flawless, with paintings morphing from a handsome prince into a hideous monster in the exact screen location. With several pathways and floor levels available in each stage, the game doesn’t have that straightforward feel typical of Mario games.

That said the phenomenal visuals also come at a price. Sometimes the screen is so busy with moving platforms, enemies, and water that you’re unable to see that the bridge you’re about to jump on is missing. You end up dying more times than you should because the invisible platforms blend too well with the environment, and this becomes quite the annoyance in the later difficult levels that require Giana to be constantly moving. It’s also a problem when having to alter between punk and cute Giana rapidly; the world transformations may obstruct your view, blocking you from seeing the enemies right above you. Consequently, it shines a light on the lack of variety in the enemies, most of which are just devils and birds.

There are a total of twenty-three levels, with additional modes available should you prefer a more complex experience. There’s score attack mode for point-oriented players, with the objective of collecting as many gems as possible and defeating enemies to boost your score. Then there’s time attack, where you beat a level as fast as you can while ignoring gems. Conversely, this is a tricky mode given how you cannot restart a level in the middle of your playthrough. If you’re unsatisfied with your run, unfortunately you have to either finish it or restart the game. Then there’s hardcore mode with no checkpoints, and über hardcore, where if you die you start over at level one. Good luck!

Black Forest Games revitalized its series by staying true to the game’s origins while still moving past its blatant clone gimmicks. Even after filing for insolvency when they were Spellbound Entertainment and having to buy back their own assets from the government, they were able to make a positive out of a bad situation. Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams is an aesthetically pleasing journey that’s as gorgeous as it is taxing, blending new ideas and old concepts in the same way punk and cute Giana co-exist. This just proves that long forgotten franchises can definitely make a comeback—looks like it’s a trend, Ducktales anyone?—and make a new name for themselves.

+ It’s no longer a Mario­ rip-off

+ Extraordinary visuals and soundtrack

— Level design sometimes works against you

8.5 / 10

This is the kind of game that outlets dislike. It’s offered to the pool of reviewers, hoping that among them at least one has already played and understood the series. If not, then the coverage will invariably be flamed by the dedicated audience, mocking the fact that the reviewer didn’t even know this bit of minutiae after fifty hours of gameplay.

Well I’m drawing a line in the sand. If you want a review simply validating your love for Monster Hunter, you won’t get it here. Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate has real problems, and while I’m starting to understand the game underneath that has developed such a cult following, I can’t neglect its shortcomings because of that.

First, let me start with what Monster Hunter does well. Through various revisions of the game (and there have been many), the Monster Hunter experience is slowly approaching what I imagine as the perfect MMO of the future. It’s the sort of game you see in science fiction; a realized, fully-interactive game that becomes the opiate of the masses. It’s a breathing world that feels bigger than you… a world that exists without your input; you only travel through it. Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate has that quality in fits and spurts in between design decisions that range from confusing to downright antagonistic.

As you’d guess, you hunt monsters in Monster Hunter. Your home base is a small coastal village that offers typical RPG services like item shops, weapon upgrades, and a cozy bed that doubles as a save point. From here you can rearrange your inventory (which you will do frequently), pour over stat screens to suss out the numbers you want, and gawk at the sheer amount of stuff on tap. The amount of content in the game is absurd: 12 weapon classes, each with dozens of weapons to be crafted and upgraded, loads of armor pieces, 22 pages of craftable items, bugs, worms, fish, horns, claws… the list goes on and on. Let it never be said that MH3U is hurting for activity.

Once you get your inventory in order, it’s time to hunt a monster like the title promises. If you’re familiar with the series you know what to expect, but in Monster Hunter, just stabbing a monster to death is not as simple as it sounds. A hunt is like a protracted boss raid in World of Warcraft with controls deceptively close to a third person beat ‘em up. Basically, a huge monster romps around performing various attacks telegraphed by short animations and you have to swat at it with your weapons until it dies. If you’re equipped properly and prepared with the right potions, bombs, and buffs, some of these hunts can end in ten to fifteen minutes. If not, expect a single hunt to hit the 45-minute mark easily.

Fighting in Monster Hunter has ups and downs, and at the very least it’s unlike any other game. The most immediate and polarizing aspect of Monster Hunter’s combat is its tempo. Enemies move very quickly and you… do not, even when using the fastest weapons. The speed of your attacks changes depending on your weapon type: dual blades will have you spinning around the battlefield while the giant sword requires a one-second windup before your character gets the sword in motion. If you start attacking at the wrong time, you either whiff completely or eat an attack while your character musters up the energy to move his damn weapon. To put it in Capcom parlance, you plod along at Lost Planet speed while your enemies move in Devil May Cry time.

That makes the game harder, and not in a way that always feels fair or interesting. Take the simple act of drinking a health potion. Not only do you have to watch your character knock back the bottle, but then he / she flexes with renewed vigor after finishing it, tacking on an extra half second to the time you have to stand motionless and vulnerable. This is obviously meant to prevent you from dropping heals in the middle of a fight, but the manner it’s enforced in the game feels cheap and blunt. Surely there is a better, more interesting, and more intuitive way to enforce these game rules than immobilizing players for long periods of time.

It’s not all bad though. By enforcing certain restrictions, the game mandates the proper planning and information gathering before a fight. You can’t simply carry 99 potions into a fight and bash your head against a monster until it dies. Scouting out the enemy, laying traps to take advantage of its behaviors, and avoiding damage is rewarding in a Batman sort of way. Just because the barriers in your way are artificial doesn’t make them less satisfying to overcome.

But artificial difficulty is not the most bewildering design decision in the game. Monster Hunter’s world itself is an anachronism; rather than give you one large field to explore and hunt, the play area is divided into small numbered zones. This is presumably a design limitation inherited from the series’ birth on the PlayStation 2 and it’s silly that the game is still structured this way. Yes, it has been adopted into the gameplay to some degree — discrete, numbered zones make communication simple, and changing zones is a quick means of escape in near-death situations. Still, the game’s immersion would benefit by dropping the loading screens between areas and offering the large wilderness its facade implies.

At least Monster Hunter has awkwardly modernized with online multiplayer. It works, though just like everything else in the game, it requires traveling through a series of menus that muddy what should be a straightforward ordeal (for instance, 3DS link play is called “Multi” while online is called “Network”). Once you learn how to navigate the system’s kinks, playing with friends is a functional experience. Voice chat with the Wii U tablet is surprisingly positive as well; I didn’t experience the echo or terrible voice quality I expected.

Still, Monster Hunter takes for granted a lot of extracurricular effort on behalf of its players. How much extra research are you willing to do on a game’s systems before you expect to have fun with it? How many nonsensical, anachronistic hoops are you willing to jump through just for a slight taste of what this game will hopefully become in ten years’ time?

Your answer to those questions probably boils down to disposable free time, and MH3U has the potential to consume all of it. If I had to pick one game for the rest of my life, it’d be Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate. But I want to do something else with the rest of my life, and the game doesn’t feel any inclination to help me out with that.

But hey, I remember having way more free time than money, and that’s the ideal audience for this game. There is a very fun game underneath the decade-old design, and if you don’t mind killing a handful of evenings to cut through it, you’ll be satisfied. However, if you haven’t already made that concession, don’t expect to now.

+ Tons of content

+ Awkward but rewarding combat

- Still plays like a ten year old game

7 / 10

The original Sniper Ghost Warrior was bothered by technical issues and an unforgiving AI, but despite that still managed to sell 3.5 million copies. It was inevitable that a sequel would be made, so is Sniper Ghost Warrior 2 the game fans deserve? Let’s find out.

You play as Cole Anderson in the single-player campaign that is broken into three Acts. The campaign is short, super linear, and most of the time you’re being told where to go and what to do by your spotter; I clocked my first play through in less than five hours. Each act takes place in a real world location starting with the jungles of the Philippines. Act II is a flashback sequence set in 1993 at a bombed out Sarajevo where, spoiler, your spotter, Maddox betrays you, leading you to shoot him. Act III wraps up the campaign in the mountains of Tibet where you learn Maddox is still alive and behind the terrorist plot. You get to shoot him again; I clipped him on the first attempt, achievement unlocked.

Sniper Ghost Warrior 2 is powered by the CryEngine 3, but after seeing how games like Crysis 3 utilize that technology, I was extremely underwhelmed at how the developer CI Games integrated that same technology into this new sequel. Honestly, I was expecting more in the visual/sound department; I would’ve really liked to see the developer max out the game’s engine, show the full power and potential of the technology, elevate it above other sniping games, and make it stand out…but instead it fell short.

Improvements have been made in the gameplay department over the original, but for every step forward, the gameplay seems to take a step back. Sniper Ghost Warrior 2 adds new mechanics like the inclusion of the stealth kill, tagging enemies, and the introduction of the Motion Sense Trigger System, a step forward. How you squeeze the controller’s trigger determines how the shot fires from the gun, its recoil, and the ending location of the bullet; that’s all similar to a real-life sniper pulling the trigger on his weapon. Pro tip, treat it like a lady and squeeze the trigger gently. The thermal goggles–a step back–allow you to see enemies through thin objects, like wood, but I only used it once, and that was after being instructed to do so. It’s a cool feature to use, but when I wanted to use them again, the equipment wasn’t available in that mission. On top of that, on the rare occasion when the goggles were available for use, most of the enemies would hind behind some impenetrable cover, making the goggles ineffective or in the words of Radioactive Man, “My eyes, the goggles do nothing.”

I really enjoyed the sections where you would set up your high-powered sniper rifle to provide support to the troops on the ground below. I loved watching as my bullet spiraled through the night sky, a silent assassin, on its way into the head of an unsuspecting enemy on the lookout. On the flip side, I had issues with the co-op sync’d snipe that you’d use with your spotter to avoid detection. It can be fun to take enemies out in tandem, when it works, which is about half the time. Your spotter would tell you to take out the guard on the right or left, he’ll take out the other. The spotter is ready on your go, you fire, but he doesn’t shoot, causing the enemy to scramble to cover and raise the alarm, leading to backup, #frustrating.

Also when does shooting someone in the head with a high caliber sniper round not kill them, only knock off their helmet?

The first game was plagued with AI issues and CI Games listened to the community and changed the way enemies act in Sniper Ghost Warrior 2. Enemies follow simple patterns when patrolling, like talking loudly to other guards, or standing alone in a secluded area, but once something snags the enemies’ attention, they go into Intrigued Mode, which is where they stop the basic patterns, shoulder their weapons, and glare in the direction of where the noise originated. Furthermore, assuming the enemy feels threatened, like if you biff your co-op snipe shot, the enemy will run to cover, remaining there, trying to find you. When they do find you, they shoot from cover. Depending on the numbers, the enemy will attempt to flank you and/or close the distance on your position by firing and moving from cover to cover, keeping you pinned down.

The kill cams have returned, but are not used as frequently as they were in the original, mostly coming about when you score a direct hit on the last enemy in the area, and also the cams don’t use as interesting angles  as the ones in Sniper Elite V2.

I tip my hat to Sniper Ghost Warrior 2 when it comes to the higher difficulties. CI Games upped the ante by taking away aids like the red dot on your scope, leaving you to take environmental elements into account, like wind speed and bullet drop, before firing the shot. All the other problems remain at the higher difficulty settings, but if you’re looking for even more of a challenge, crank it up for a more authentic sniper experience.

Just like the original, Sniper Ghost Warrior 2 features a multiplayer component, but it’s shallow at best, with only two maps available in a 6v6, Team Death Match set up. You get to choose from about four different rifles, each one varies in range, etc. You’re also equipped with a silenced pistol. The rest of the game pretty much plays out how you can imagine: lying prone in the back of a building, scope zoomed-in to the max, scanning the abandoned buildings for a trace of another player, firing the occasional shot. It was rewarding when I finally did shoot somebody, even if I only got two or three kills in a 20-minute match. But honestly, I wasn’t expecting anything else; after all, it is a sniping game. I would’ve like to have seen a mode other than TDM, maybe something like two snipers supporting a ground team trying to invade the enemy’s HQ, maybe even more weapons or at least a smoke grenade. If you want more of a Call of Duty feel you’re not going to find it here: sorry no quick scoping. If you are looking for something a little faster-paced, I recommend going the lone wolf route by running towards the other side of the map where the opposing team is, searching out the other players who are lying in wait, and shooting them while they’re staring off into the distance.

Bottom line, Sniper Ghost Warrior 2 is an okay game with some enjoyable parts, but the campaign is too short, missions are too linear, the CryEngine 3 usage is too minimal; just too many missed opportunities. I like CI Games and this series; I just expected more, unfortunately, this is not the game fans deserve.

+ Motion Sense Trigger System
+ Authentic Sniper Experience on Hard Difficulties
- Underwhelming Use of CryEngine 3
- Short/Linear Campaign

6 / 10