Most Real Time Strategy (RTS) games follow a basic template - explore and forage for resources, build a base, generate some units, fight, repeat. This formula is tweaked and expanded upon by games like StarCraft, Command & Conquer and Age Of Empires and sometimes slimmed down to create the subgenre of Tower Defence games, where the key to victory lies mainly in the placing of fixed turrets along a path of approaching enemies.Rymdkapsel is all of this, and less. Not that we are complaining - with its stripped-bare gameplay and starkly functional graphics, this is RTS at its most elemental Read more ...

A planet ravaged by snowstorms, home to a load of angry reptilian aliens, with human colonies surviving on a mix of giant "mech" walking vehicles and hoarding thermal energy – Lost Planet's setting has always been fairly interesting. It's a shame then that this prequel so badly bodges everything.Told in a series of flashbacks, your gee-shucks, country-loving, everyman contractor is just there, initially, to kill the alien creatures, repair equipment and trudge around in a walking forklift. But soon you uncover a conspiracy among the companies running the colony and it all kicks off.Or rather Read more ...

The Saints Row series has always been something of a magpie, stealing liberally from other games. It started out as a cheap second-tier Grand Theft Auto clone. But here, it transforms into a very silly, but great fun knockabout superhero game - the most gleefully rampaging fun gameplay you'll see this week.Trying to summarise the plot of Saints Row IV should give you some sense of exactly how seriously the game takes itself. The members of a street gang, called The Saints, decide to put their gangbanging past behind them and turn their appetite for destruction to good – they take on a Read more ...

Hardcore First Person Shooter (FPS) fans have their own preferences for controlling their favourite 3D action games. This usually boils down to the little/big-endian dichotomy of analogue thumbstick controller or mouse+keyboard combo (WASD for movement and strafing, space to jump, click to fire. Obviously.) Rarely will you see anyone coming out in favour of mobile or tablet touchscreens as the One True Way and there is an excellent reason for this - without physical feedback, controlling an FPS using a touchscreen is almost always a frustrating experience marked by a lack of precision.The Read more ...

It feels odd to consider cyberpunk - once the very bleeding edge of science fiction - as nostalgia, but what was once seen by some as an almost credible future is now to be found in the cultural dump-bin marked NINETIES, alongside the Tamagotchi, platform trainers and clamshell mobile phones.The world of Shadowrun is niche even with cyberpunk. Originally a tabletop RPG, the game mixes the latter's standard palette of hackers, corporate warriors and neon-noir, with the magic and monsters of urban fantasy. Elves and Orks (note spelling: these are not Tolkien's brutish Orcs but rather a tech- Read more ...

In Deus Ex: The Fall you play Ben Saxon, a cybernetically-enhanced mercenary out for vengeance against a global conspiracy responsible for the deaths of his comrades. Saxon's plotline is a continuation of Icarus Effect, a tie-in novel to the PC/console game Deus Ex: Human Revolution. The two games share background more than plot, but that background is well drawn and makes for an immersive world full of assassins, hired guns and cyberpunk conspiracy.Saxon is aided in his mission by former US Secret Service agent Anna Kelso - another character from Icarus Effect - and by an array of cybernetic Read more ...

This curious strategy series popped out of the head of legendary games-maker Shigeru "Mario, Donkey Kong" Miyamoto when he started gardening. But beneath the verdant landscapes and gigantic primary-coloured fruits there is a darker, richer soil.In Pikmin 3, three space people arrive on an unspoilt planet, desperately seeking food, their own planet having been strip-mined to starvation. In this new lush land they find an abundence of food, and a curious species - half flower, half ant. The Pikmin are only too happy to help the spacefarers – carrying food, attacking predatory enemies, ferrying Read more ...

Just go and buy it and download it right now, OK? Gunpoint is fantastic for so many reasons. But primarily it's fantastic because it plays fantastically. It's easy to lose sight of that fact when you learn the back story behind the game, when it's put in context. But let's not lose sight of this – Gunpoint is great fun to play.This stealth puzzle game sees your intrepid industrial espionage agent/hat-and-coated gumshoe breaking into a series of side-on buildings to investigate dodgy murders, steal corporate secrets and eavesdrop on intriguing conversations. These buildings are full of armed Read more ...

Among gamers, suggesting that Nintendo is not a publisher of brilliant games is tantamount to heresy. Yet here it is: Mario & Luigi: Dream Team Bros. would, if it were not published by Nintendo, receive a far worse critical reaction than it's likely to get.Dream Team Bros. sees the iconic videogaming duo, nominally plumbers by trade, apparently Italian by stereotypical accent, navigating a sleepy island beset by dreams and nightmares. What follows is in turn exploration, simplistic role-playing turn-based strategy, with a timing element and dreamlike platform gaming. And it's only the Read more ...

At first glance, Rogue Legacy looks like a straight retro platformer in the vein of Castlevania or The Lost Vikings. You must negotiate a castle and other environs made up of floating platforms, floor spikes and fireball-spewing traps while collecting loot hidden in chests or inside the smashable furniture while being harried by varied enemies who mostly follow set paths.Of course, the devil is in the detail and - in this case - the title. Rogue Legacy is a form of "roguelike" - a class of RPG descended from the ancient ASCII game Rogue and noted for being brutally unforgiving. Rogue's single Read more ...

Fusing the intensity of first-person shooters like the Call of Duty series with top-down strategy games doesn't immediately seem a good fit. First-person shooters work because you respond viscerally to bullets flying past your face and the fear of the battlefield as you sprint through mayhem, dodging and weaving. Strategy games, even the realtime modern videogame versions, rely on a cerebral strategising – often sacrificing men as pawns in a broader scheme. Yet fusing these two ideas is exactly what Company of Heroes 2 tries to do and mostly succeeds at.Here, your World War II Russian forces Read more ...

Act I of Kentucky Route Zero set out a stall of intriguing characters, noirishly low-res visuals and an atmosphere that slid imperceptibly between "eerie" and "magical". Arranged around the core gameplay of a classic point 'n' click adventure (think Monkey Island or Broken Sword) was something that was barely a game at all but rather a sort of magical realist road movie in gaming drag.There are no objects to collect and combine into tools, no mazes to navigate, and the only real puzzles are those you are left with once the game ends. This may sound like a recipe for rank pretension but Read more ...