Gaming
Steve O'Rourke
Love, loathe or feel totally indifferent about Jedis and Stormtroopers, there will be no avoiding the Force when the cinematic phenomenon that is Star Wars rolls out a fresh instalment in a few short weeks. The latest in a long, long line of Star Wars videogames doesn’t capitalise on the new source material and instead focuses on the universe of the original three films. You’ll reenact the icy Hoth battles from The Empire Strikes Back, creep through the dense foliage of the Ewok-infested Endor forest, and kick sand in the face of naughty imperial scum on Tatooine.We’re in the world of first ( Read more ...
theartsdesk
Fallout 4 ★★★★★Take one part Mad Max, mix with two parts Borderlands 2, add an extra mature story that spans 200 years, sprinkle generously with interesting characters, side quests and more collectible items than you could jiggle a digital cocktail shaker at, pour over a gigantic post apocalyptic landscape and serve. Raise a toast to Fallout 4, the perfect tonic for long winter nights.We’re in the world of free roaming adventure, nuclear aftermath, item crafting, character development, visceral combat, resource management and, erm, pets. The Commonwealth world is vast, the story worthy of big Read more ...
theartsdesk
Guitar Hero Live ★★★★My first encounter with the Guitar Hero music rhythm games stretches back to 2008. It involved British Sea Power, the Mercury Prize-nominated indie band, trooping into my living room to put an array of plastic guitars and drums through the musical motions. More bemused than amused, the professional musicians, renowned for intricately arranged guitar pop, struggled to hit the correct colour-coded notes in the right sequence as they appeared on the TV.“It’s great fun, but nothing like making music,” conceded Jan Scott Wilkinson, the front man, as he fumbled his way down a Read more ...
Simon Munk
Since Crossy Road took mobile devices by storm, every developer seems intent on copying its success. Largely by copying its cute isometric retro visual approach and grafting it onto other genres. Even Crossy Road's makers are at it – Shooty Skies applies the same visual style to a "bullet hell" shoot-em-up arcade game. With BlockQuest, as with The Quest Keeper, the genre is dungeon-bashing RPG. And again, this turns out to be a fairly good, if derivative move.BlockQuest at its heart is a fairly simple games, with Crossy Road-style simple controls. You simply tap the screen to keep on going in Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
Zombies. Thousands of ‘em. Not just in Madfinger’s new shooter, Unkilled of course. Zombies are everywhere, swarming all over popular culture in that shuffley way of theirs. They are the new Nazis - fanatical in their onslaught and easily killed without a pang of conscience.This is Madfinger’s third zombie game, following on from its successful Dead Trigger series. Dead Trigger 1 & 2 were also first-person shooters operating on a Free To Play model, so is Unkilled just more of the same?The plot suggests so. You are a central casting Elite Military Dude (your biography says you have a Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
The Deer God is a platform game set in a lovingly rendered world of pixel art. It is completely unforgiving and will test to destruction both your platform jumping skills but perhaps also your patience.In the cut scene that starts the game, you are a hunter who accidentally shoots a young deer before being set upon by wolves. Raised from the dead by the titular forest god, you are reincarnated into the body of the deer and made to serve out a curious penitence. You must now live and survive in your new body, while helping some other inhabitants of the wilderness solve their problems. Along Read more ...
Simon Munk
From the sublime, to the mundane. Last week's insane Metal Gear Solid V gives way to this freeroaming action-adventure cash-in on the Mad Max: Fury Road film. But a threadbare plot and far too much back-and-forth in play does this game no favours. Particularly in comparison to the other big action game out this week.When Max's infamous Interceptor car is grabbed and scrapped by a group of Scabrous Scrotus' War Boys, the wheels are set in motion for a showdown. But first, Max needs a new car – the Magnum Opus – created piece by piece by insane, hunchback mutant mechanic Chumbucket.To build the Read more ...
Simon Munk
A unicorn, on fire; the wet slap of flesh on hospital linoleum; homoerotic manhugs from wounded soldiers. The latest and greatest in the legendary Metal Gear Solid series starts odd. But brilliantly odd.Waking in a hospital bed, covered in bandages is Big Boss. Or Ahab, as what appears to be a face-covered Kiefer Sutherland in a hospital gown insists on calling you. Before you know it Kiefer's helping you make a madcap escape from some distinctly superhuman entities that feel torn straight from the pages of a Manga comic, in a hospital covered in blood, on fire.Then Kiefer's gone and a bloke Read more ...
Simon Munk
A tidy, English village. Swings hang in the breeze, a bicycle's discarded by a phone box, smoke curls over an ashtray in the pub garden. But no one's here. No one's ever coming back.Everybody's Gone to the Rapture isn't just one of the most arresting, creepy and intriguing pieces of domestic sci-fi since John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos (or Jeff Noon's Falling out of Cars); it's also an exercise in minimalism at play – what happens in a game if you remove all the controller grappling and actual interactivity from it. Here, you simply wander around finding things.Waking up near an Read more ...
Simon Munk
Sneak in, get the jewels, don't be seen. It should all be so simple. No, it really should be all so simple – because Mike "Thomas Was Alone" Bithell's second solo game does best when it keeps things simple and sticks to its purist gameplay guns. The problem is on top Bithell has layered phoned-in A-list celeb voice-acting, top-heavy thematic concepts and an attempt to retell the Robin Hood story in a YouTube and Twitch age.The play's the thing – and Volume does that superlatively. Taking clear inspiration from Metal Gear Solid's virtual reality missions, it presents sparse and stylised Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
A common tactic among games developers is to take a very simple game and dress it up with graphical frills until it appears special. There are any number of classic games that have been cloned and tarted up with a 3D makeover or rebadged with licensed characters to attract a new generation of players but few that manage to keep that audience for long.A Day In The Woods is a very simple puzzle game based on sliding tiles. It is, as far as I can tell, original but has the feel of a classic logic puzzle like Theseus and the Minotaur or Fox and Goose. What makes it shine is both the solidity of Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
On TV, the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones is usually the most shocking and pivotal. In the game? Maybe not so much.We rejoin the disparate members of House Forrester after a rather downbeat third episode. Former squire Gared is accused of murdering a fellow brother in the Night's Watch, brash mercenary Asher has reached Daenerys Targaryen but finds the Mother Of Dragons less cooperative than he might have liked and naive lady-in-waiting Mira finds herself ensnared in the machinations of court. Meanwhile, back at chez Forrester, newly-appointed Lord Roderik struggles under the mailed Read more ...