PC

The inclusion of state-of-the-art realism in modern videogames is a tricky topic with many avenues available to development teams keen to push the envelope. Some will burn through millions of dollars ensuring that the latest and greatest shooter to hit the market has the most ultra-realistic environments available. Others will be content with engineering a lopsided museum of modern art and merely encourage...

Probably the highest compliment that can be paid to Monaco: What's Yours Is Mine is the same that could be given to any of the best entries to the stealth/action genre — that the game is as fun in slow, thoughtful moments as it is when all hell breaks loose. Considering that each of Monaco's missions are comprised of delicate heists where a single slip-up will set off alarms...

Are You Ready For The Rad-ness? The typical kind of DLC gamers expect now is pretty pedestrian; some new skins for characters or weapons, or if you’re really lucky, a new, bite sized adventure that carries on the shenanigans of the core game that was originally purchased. Ubisoft however, have done something unusual; the latest add-on, downloadable content to last year’s Far Cry 3 has absolutely nothing...

There's a certain kind of party where before you've even managed to remove your jacket and shoes you're pretty sure you want to leave. A quick glance around the room and you notice that only one other person (who you don't even like) has shown up. There's no music on and the host is in a bad mood. You've come, though, and it would be...

The Indies Keep Coming Sony continues its mandate to bring unique, independent games to the PS3 and Vita (one of the reasons probably being the Vita is in dire need of titles) and Thomas Was Alone is the latest addition to the parade. Like quite a few of these indie titles, this isn’t actually a new game, having originally debuted last year on the PC and Mac....

The Sacred series has always managed to provide gamers with a fairly predictable hack ‘n’ slash roleplaying experience. Hardly “Game of the Year” stuff, but quirky and thoroughly enjoyable nevertheless. The original Sacred, released back in 2004, swiftly gained a captive audience with its meaty mob encounters and off-centre humour. Sacred 2 continued the trend in 2008, although by that time developer Ascaron had reached a little...

If you haven’t been following the development of Defiance, roughly two years ago the SyFy channel finally got the ball rolling on their dream to create a trans-media event. They made a single universe split down the center of your television screen. Coming in through the cable box is a weekly, hour long science fiction show about a human-alien colony trying to survive in a dystopian version of St....

It might seem like a cash grab, but remaking old titles with fancy graphics and enhanced features isn’t such a cynical idea. After all, what made a lot of older titles great were the design limitations at play in the first place. If a lack of memory or graphics capability prevented a certain gameplay element from being introduced, clever developers had to find a compromise to produce...

Although there's no shortage of massively-multiplayer online titles these days, Snail Games are hoping to draw in scores of new players with its new take on a traditional theme. Set during China's Ming dynasty, and centred upon the expansive and ever-popular wuxia fantasy, Age of Wushu features a classless permanent PvP sandbox environment with a large PvE component. Much like real martial arts, character progression is achieved with...

Poking The Beehive When Bioshock first landed on consoles many console veterans didn’t know what to expect. PC gamers, on the other hand, expected a dark, moody, atmospheric game that breathed life into its characters via audio recordings, and put players through a gaming experience by turns filled with unique mechanics and occasionally even threw out some scares. What no one expected was the level of uncompromising...

A Showdown Throwdown What happens when you take the best parts of 80s action movies and throw them in a blender with fast paced multiplayer and over the top violence? Chances are you would end up with something like The Showdown Effect from Arrowhead Games. The Magika makers have traded in Norse mythology for the dazzling neon of the 1980s in their new 2.5D side-scrolling shooter....

Maxis may have the hardest job in game design there is. Managing the expectations of thousands of armchair city planners is something even municipal councils regularly fail to achieve; little wonder then that Electronic Arts’ subsidiary is feeling the heat with its latest release. SimCity , after all, is a legendary series. First released in 1989, it showed to an experimental industry that gaming victory...

New Beginnings Reboots have been a pretty big thing in recent years. They have a singular purpose; taking an established property that is well known—and perhaps a tad too familiar to audiences by this point—and going back to the start. Reboots tinker with origins, change details and subsequently perceptions of the property, hopefully also changing the attitude of the audience, making a stale character seem new, fresh...

One of the prettiest shooter franchises in modern memory is back for another high jumping, car kicking, cloaking good time. Crysis 3 again has players nano-suiting it up as series protagonist "Prophet" returns to New York City 23 years after the events of Crysis 2. It's the city so nice the series has visited twice. This time around the bright lights of the city that never sleeps have been...

Omerta: City of Gangsters is the latest title from one of my favourite simulation developers Haemimont Games best known for their work on the Tropico series. Traditionally, Tropico is rife with political commentary and caricatures of political figures and ideals. Omerta: City of Gangsters on the other hand, is a bit of a different direction for the developer. This time, instead of skewering global politics, Hamimont Games has decided...

Is This Gonna’ Be A Stand Up Fight, Or A Bug Hunt? Few films have burned themselves into the delicate, collective pop culture consciousness of the 80s generation the way Aliens did. A blend of teasing, seductive science fiction, primal horror, and the kind of gun blazing action that only an 80s director would find plausible, it became the high watermark that every other SF/Action film would...

Horror in videogames has been a hard thing to do well. Once accomplished, however, it can yield fantastic results. Dead Space was a game that managed to straddle that line between horror and action, allowing the player to experience feelings of dread yet still give enough tools to overcome the hell that has surrounded them. Unfortunately, the series has been on a downward trajectory since that first landmark installment....

Strike Suit Zero demands three things of its players: the audacity to engage in hectic dogfights in a fighter jet that can often seem as if its constructed of tissue paper, a desire to play pretend pilot to the point of overlooking a handful of significant design flaws . . . and, of course, the strong stomach necessary to withstand the motion sickness of air combat. Those with the...

Sometimes it's really nice when game surprises me. And I was quite surprised by Skulls of the Shogun by 17-BIT. Not only did I find Skulls to be a well put together and accessible strategy game, but also found that I really enjoyed the art and sense of humor of this silly samurai strategy. 17-BIT's motto is "Remember video games? We do" and according to their website...

The allure of Skyrim has always been the ability to "speak" to dragons, and the Dragonborn DLC enhances and expands upon this concept in several valuable ways. This DLC packs a 10 + hour wallop, side quests not included, and it's certainly a larger departure than the bite-sized and inconsequential Hearthfire. Solstheim is rife with additional dungeons, mystery, and best of all, dragons. Dragonborn must be accesed...