Browsing all articles in reviews.

Dance if you Want to: A Review of Break Blocks

What is a man to do with a broken heart? The wrenching strain of rejection, lost time, and unrequited passion is often too much for a man to simply grin and bear it. He gets crushed, slowly, inexorably, his head driven closer and closer to the very toes that try so hard to maintain his standing dignity. As the crown of his cranium reaches the floor, he submits, his arms limp. As they touch the floor, Netwonian mechanics take over: his feet rise, his head assumes its role as the new foundation, and gravity begins to sway him to and fro. He fights this new wrenching strain, this gravitational torque. Its force quickly matches and thus counteracts said emotional forces, providing relief, but soon it overcomes them. He finds himself locked in a battle of centrifugal forces, neck torsion injuries, and the awestruck hoots and hollers of bystanders. He has forgotten the pain of unrequited love, he has found the blissful release of a septuple headspin.

And then he thinks, this would make a kickass videogame.

Time Flies: A Review Of Sine Mora

We like to dwell on time. Time wasted, time remaining, where it goes and how much it’s worth to us. We elevate it to such a status that it becomes the very measure by which we live our lives – time is money, early to bed early to rise – these maxims have been drilled into us to the point of axiom. Our fascination with time is a morbid one, centered around our utter powerlessness and inability to control it or influence it in any way. We are completely and inexorably beholden to the ebb and flow of time, and we spend our lives intrinsically obsessing over it.

Sine Mora is a game that takes our hardwired obsession with time to an extreme degree. The world in which Sine Mora is set is extemporaneous, its denizens having mastered time so that past, present, and future have all become merely academic concepts. And yet the game’s story (which admittedly strains under the weight of some incredibly unnecessary lore) ultimately belies the carefree nature with which the characters manipulate the flow of time, driving home the fact that our attempts to master time are all reduced to the temporal equivalent of spitting into the wind.

Lucrative Warfare: A Review of Syndicate

The year is 2069. The Dart 6 chip, invented in 2017, has dramatically reorganized the world’s infrastructure. Corporations succeed nations as organizing bodies; neural implant chips make handheld technology obsolete; the privileged class of humanity plugs in to the dataverse while the rest are left to the gutters. The world of Syndicate is grim indeed.

The reboot of classic strategy title from Bullfrog Studios arrives 19 years after the original with a fresh vision. Instead of a top-down, turn-based title, developer Starbreeze Studios have taken to ground and situated players within the body of Miles Kilo, agent of the world’s leading syndicate, EuroCorp. Syndicate tasks players with literally eliminating the competition amidst a tense powder keg of corporate espionage. While Syndicate fails to engross players in its promising but shallow universe, it delivers some of the strongest shooting mechanics in recent memory, a suite of powers and abilities to compliment the experience, and a rewarding cooperative campaign.

One Sword to Rule Them All: A Review of Brand

 “Yo bro, go make this sword amazeballs.” With that one simple sentence, a young hero sets out on a dangerous journey. Okay, that isn’t exactly what the knight-commander tells you in the single opening frame, but you will probably wish it was just to break up Brand’s arduous journey. Get ready to die.

Poetry in Motion: A Review of Dear Esther

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
and sorry I could not travel both”
- The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost

I stand on a concrete jetty and stare out into the spray and mist. The salt stings my eyes and the cold chills my fingers as I turn around and head towards the dilapidated lighthouse. My mind wanders to the tale of a hermit that lived on the island as I walk down the deserted beach, past broken crab nets and other detritus that litter the shoreline. I skirt a fibonacci spiral that has been etched into the sand by persons unknown and muse on the history of this Hebridean island, on the shepherds who built the weather beaten buildings, on the aborted plans for a wind farm before the island was abandoned, on Esther.

Kingdoms and Ends: a Review of Crusader Kings II

The time for chicken sandwiches and salads has passed. In its place, an era of righteous Catholics, pagan Mohammedans, and angry peasants is cresting, like some cresting thickness that crests thickly and interminably, thickly cresting until the end of time. No more chicken sandwiches. No more chicken salads. Just peasants and religious zealotry until God himself comes and wipes out the Mohammedans.

Zombies? Zombies!: A Review of Dead Block

If someone came up to you and offered you a game that let you take a crap on a zombie’s head as a damage-over-time effect, you would check it out, right? Of course you would. Now what if that was the only really interesting part of the game? You’d play for, what, fifteen minutes and then wander off? That sums up the Dead Block experience unfortunately well.

Riding the Rails: A Review of Afterfall: InSanity

Imagine going on a haunted house ride at your local carnival. As you first take off, things look so real and visceral that you’re terrified. But as the cart continues down the track, you begin to realize that just as you start to come face-to-face with the really scary stuff, you suddenly turn away and continue happily down the track. As you continue on, you notice you’re constantly coming to the brink of something truly horrifying, and yet through it all you know you’re just on a ride and you’ve always been totally safe.

Afterfall: InSanity is just like a carnival ride; it appears at first to be sending you into a genuinely scary experience, only to fall short of delivering the expected thrills at the last moment. It is a game that straddles the line between well executed horror and shallow action title, committing to neither particularly effectively.

Jet Set Janitor: A Review of Dustforce

Every kid is afraid of growing up and becoming a janitor. Anyone that’s had the job can tell you that it really isn’t too bad (on days when every toilet functions properly), but the attached social stigmas of being a sanitation worker transform the job into the pinnacle of bad life choices. But if the real job was anything like the ninja-infused shenanigans in Dustforce, not a single kid alive would dream of being an astronaut when they grow up.

Yup, ninja janitors outclass astronauts in coolness. Definitely.

Menage A Trois: A Review of Trine 2

A trine, or triad, is a group of three. Like the Book of Three (see what I did there?), Trine 2 is a tale awash with all the high fantasy elements we’ve come to know and love. Indeed, three intrepid heroes set out once again to swing, smash and solve their way through Frozenbyte’s gorgeous follow-up to 2009’s hit platformer. While each of the three classes are nothing special on their own, the most distinguished feature of this series is the ability to swap between them mid-stride. In other words, you don’t have to choose. Indecisive like me? Good.

Cue flute and harp.