Gamesugar

January 16, 2012

Review – Choplifter HD

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 9:06 am

Review Choplifter HD
Given the number of vintage games that return year after year, I suppose Choplifter was overdue for a revisit in an era that loves adding HD to the end of game titles. The last time I laid eyes on that particular classic, the visuals crackled through a Commodore monitor and writing videogames as two separate words wasn’t yet something I considered a crime. My eyes were also crusted and red from spending hours flying to one end of the screen to pickup hostages and then flying back to the other end to drop them off – rinsing and repeating in an obsessive way that seemed normal during my childhood.

InXile Entertainment’s HD revival doesn’t detour from this core formula that made the most of technical limitations, offering a sidescroller that asks you to travel from one end of the screen and back again, again, and again. Despite what I consider a premium price point for the privilege, Choplifter HD is also a game of cheap and immediate thrills that doesn’t beg for more than a minimal time commitment, satisfied with whatever little bit of time you have to spare here and there. But aside from the explosions and burst play style, it’s not so easily written off either.

Plus, trying to squish people hoping to be saved is still a guilty bit of fun.

(more…)

January 12, 2012

Review – Mighty Switch Force

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 12:53 am

Review Mighty Switch Force
Largely owing to the poor driving skills of law enforcement officials, the streets of the future will be overrun by blonde criminal vixens. As a ludicrously dressed officer of the law, your mission is to search out and apprehend these escapees with your trusty pistol and the ability to phase platform aiding blocks in-and-out of existence.

So not quite RoboCop, but it’ll do.

WayForward’s latest 2D offering is scaled toward creating a smaller series of incidents that fit a quick speedrun flavored agenda, which doesn’t leave nearly so much meat on the discussion bone but does make for a good and proper portable diversion. The objective of tracking down a set number of convicts per stage with the aid of a singular ability is certainly the developer’s most straightforward effort in recent memory, and creates a space where a more narrowly focused title can simply add to the layers of difficulty without losing cohesion along the way.

There isn’t as much space for the vibrant animations of BloodRayne: Betrayal or the long corridors of Aliens: Infestation, but there’s something familiar and quaint here to while away a few hours near a fireplace stoked by digital nostalgia.

(more…)

January 6, 2012

Review – Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath HD

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , — Brad Johnson @ 3:51 pm

Oddworld Strangers Wrath HD
Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath is the tale of the eponymous Stranger, a bounty hunter afflicted by a mysterious illness and distaste for traditional firearms. Maybe the latter condition makes him sound like sort of a softy, until you realize that his alternative to traditional ammunition is strapping live animals to a crossbow and lobbing them toward enemies at high speeds (and presumably to their deaths).

The game involves claiming bounties on “them outlaws”, a task that can be accomplished A) by sucking their unconscious bodies into some kind of… thing… or, B) by murdering them horribly and sucking their corpses into the same kind of…thing…

To this end, Stranger employs an eclectic mix of tricks that, in a lesser game, might not fit together. Primarily, the bounty hunter is able to switch between the first and third person perspectives, granting him some different abilities tied to those modes.

(more…)

December 26, 2011

Review – Where Is My Heart?

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , , — Colette Bennett @ 3:23 pm

Review Where Is My Heart
Where Is My Heart? aims for opposite goals compared to most games. While so many current gen titles try to woo us with fanfare, Where Is My Heart? takes a more quiet and contemplative approach. Perhaps not so surprising for a game that was inspired by the story of a real family lost in the woods and the way they fall apart when forced to rely on just their senses and each other.

We can only hope you fare better as you navigate this enchanted wood…

(more…)

December 19, 2011

Review – Corpse Party

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , , — Colette Bennett @ 9:35 am

Review Corpse Party
A “biased” review of a videogame is a hot topic in today’s Internet societies, which always seems hilarious to me: any review of any thing, whether book, film, food, business or perhaps a device which allows one’s cat to fly, will naturally be colored by the thoughts, imaginations and opinions of the reviewer.

I’m telling you this, of course, because if there’s anything I love in the world, it’s horror stories and visual novels. Tell me that a game contains either of those two elements, and I’m absolutely, positively, 100 percent in for the ride. Tell me its got both, and you could complain about bias, because I’m obviously getting to review two of my favorite things, right?

All that aside, though, Corpse Party is tremendously good, and for reasons other than my hardcore love of its themes and approach.

(more…)

November 29, 2011

Review – Jurassic Park: The Game

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , — TJ "Kyatt" Cordes @ 8:06 pm

Review Jurassic Park The Game
Remember that knife fight against Krauser in Resident Evil 4, the one that consisted entirely of quick time events? Have you ever wondered what it would be like if Krauser had been a bunch of dinosaurs, and the fight lasted several hours while being interrupted by inconsequential dialogue trees?

I’m guessing no given that if that had been the case, I sure as hell wouldn’t be wistfully mentioning RE4 at the beginning of a review once again.

Alas, my bizarre question is rooted in reality with the release of Jurassic Park: The Game, Telltale’s newest episodic movie-to-adventure game adaptation. Events unfold around the time period of the first film courtesy of a new cast of characters; some of whom work on the island, some of whom are mercenaries flying to the island to evacuate that first batch of people, and still others are sneaking onto the island to retrieve the million dollar Barbasol can full of dinosaur embryos that Nedry was trying to steal at the epicenter of this dino-disaster. In fact, ol’ Newman himself is the only character from the movie to appear in the game, though only as a mangled and faceless corpse.

For the record, there actually is a QTE-driven knife fight between one of the mercenaries and a Velociraptor, which turns out to be pretty awesome.

(more…)

November 15, 2011

Review – Rayman Origins

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 4:34 pm

review rayman origins
Over the last few days I’ve hovered on the wind along with scattered leaves in order to ascend mountain peaks. I’ve battled a giant electric eel while riding on the back of a spitfire mosquito, and I’ve even quenched the fiery indigestion within the belly of a beast. I’ve experienced all these moments and more within a game that begs for some ridiculous new benchmark in hyperbole to match the bar it raises for the platformer genre.

Perhaps something along the lines of, “and on the eighth day, Michel Ancel and company created Rayman Origins”.

(more…)

« Newer PostsOlder Posts »

Powered by WordPress