Well what can I say about my new friends Mr Kane and Mr Lynch? Well, It’s certainly fair to say that neither of these two characters are the kind of people that you would like to spend an evening dinner party with followed by a game of charades....
After coming upon Hunted around six months ago, I hoped that I would be reviewing a game with oodles of the rich RPG history that Bethesda are renowned for; with a welcome splash of hack and slash fantasy thrown in for good measure.
RPG’s have been around for decades, featuring on just about every console since the ZX Spectrum. Early examples were often very basic (in appearance) text adventures such as ‘The Hobbit’ or ‘Lords of Midnight’ although as hardware moved on, so did the RPG genre. I still remember the first time I played ‘Eye of the Beholder’ on a friends dads Amiga once and being totally blown away by both its graphics and ambitious, complex gameplay. RPG’s have moved on a lot since then, but not always in the right direction for hardcore fans of the genre, so does Dragon Age II stay true to it’s roots, or pander to EA’s army of casual fans?
My personal mobile gaming time has most recently been restricted to anything that draws my attention from the Android Market or Appstore, while my DS sits lonely in the side cabinet, longing for the days I will flick the switch and engage in a little Chrono Trigger. But for this reviewer, the DS will always have its place over my Galaxy S2.
A team based shooter similar to the Team Fortress premise made popular by Valve, Brink offers players the opportunity to fill the shoes of either the Ark Security or the Revolutionary Forces based on the floating citadel. Touting freeform parkour style movement, multiple player classes, and highly customisable characters, Brink promises a lot at the first look. In a genre where players expect innovation, quality and balance, have Bethesda managed to deliver …. the Pixel Junkies endevour to find out.
*Snore. Snore. Snore….* Grumble… Huh? Did someone wake me? Sorry about that readers, I was away with the faeries, dreaming as it were of some idyllic world populated by cute fluffy bunnies and huge, friendly birds with gigantic eyes. I dreampt that they roamed free in the knowledge that if I approached them, I could only ‘press A to interact’ and that there was simply no way I was going to blow them into a thousand chunks. They roamed freely across emerald fields, flew in clear blue SEGA inspired skies and swam in seas of deep marillion (with no gigantic, city sized, ancient predators in mind.)
This is not the world of Bulletstorm.
Donkey Kong Country Returns (or DKCR as it will be known) comes as a revival of the golden days of platforming when the Super Nintendo was King and the Mega Drive was a pretender to the throne of gaming. But is the world happy to see DK and Co again or are they simply the same banana munching Primates we saw 15 Years Ago?
Sitting down to play Dead Space 2 i got the same feeling that i got when sitting down to watch the second Matix Movie (Revolutions). As a real fan of Dead Space i couldn’t see how the developer could improve upon the original. A great story with some fine twists, great control and genuine brown trouser moments that were welcome in a new IP hitting the next generation consoles. Having checked the same build as Super Stu, i had become slightly worried that some things had changed too much and gone were the things that made Dead Space a must have.
Fate can be a cruel mistress at times. Just when the family unit were starting to have actual conversations and the addictive grip of Call of Duty might have started to wane just a little, Activision and Treyarch go and hit us up with 4 brand new maps.
