Gaming
Simon Munk
The gloom of Victorian London might be shared with The Order: 1886, also reviewed this week, but the games couldn't be further apart. In Sunless Sea, you play a nautical captain, navigating the "Unterzee" of the waters surrounding a fallen, underground London. Or rather, you play lots of captains – because if this cruel game is about anything, it's about repeated death.Death comes from being eaten by a crew turned cannibal from a lack of supplies, from drowning after pirates hole your hull, or from your ship being swallowed whole by one of many foul monsters prowling the blacked-out waters. Read more ...
Simon Munk
In terms of atmosphere, The Order: 1886 wins out in spades. It's just everywhere else that it falls down, unfortunately.Sneaking through the Ripper-stalked streets of an alternative Victorian Whitechapel, you can almost smell the stink of the slums. And certainly this matches the recent Assassin's Creed: Unity for the detailed and fetid depiction of dirty, litter-strewn cobbled streets. It's moments like this that The Order does excellently.Another high point is when the zeppelin you're on board crashes into Crystal Palace (about 50 years early, but never mind), and you stagger out of the Read more ...
Simon Munk
Techland's previous first-person zombie game was Dead Island. This swaps its beach resort location for a nondescript south American city, and its supercharged, cobbled-together weaponry for parkour-style run-jump-climb agility. One of these swaps is good news, the other not so much.Crash-landing in the zombie-infested city of Harran, your undercover government operative has to ingratiate himself with the locals, trying to survive holed up in a tower block. How he does that is largely by going and fetching things for them from all over.On the way, you also get to open up "safe houses" and Read more ...
Simon Munk
Four human players team up to take on a monster – also played by another player. That's the simple version of Evolve, a mainly multiplayer online game developed by the team that created the superlative squad horror series Left 4 Dead. It's a great idea – but is let down in execution, so far.The core of Evolve is its asymmetric play – with each side and each character requiring radically different approaches and skills even within one match. As the monster, you start each match in a weak position. You've got to move fast, but stealthily, through the industrial areas and jungles of the alien Read more ...
Helen K Parker
SANDSTORMThere's nothing worse than waking up in the desert in the middle of a raging sandstorm with all your belongings scattered and your camel gone walkabout. Thank you then Daniel Linssen for creating a game where you can simulate this experience again and again. From such an unappealing prospect however comes a contemplative little gem from this game designer whose previous track record is in cerebral puzzlers and platformers, not slow and atmospheric adventure games.Diversity breeds success though, because this is a beautiful mini-game with a very simple premise, complete your Read more ...
Simon Munk
High school – lockers, cliques, jocks. Do these things really even exist? Like Downton Abbey for American viewers, "high school" for non-Americans is a set of abstracted tropes, with most of us unable to tell how close or far from reality they are. Here they're played out to full effect in this tale of an emo girl who suddenly finds herself with time-rewinding powers.In Episode 1, so-called because this is a new-fangled "episodic" game, its plot and secrets released in stages like a TV season, there's no glamour to these time-travel powers so far – no Hitler assassinations, no amazing bets Read more ...
Simon Munk
The recent glut of reboots, remasters and HD updates for classic videogames is not a sign of a fatigued industry, out of imagination. One of the biggest issues with videogames and the rapid evolution of the the gadgets and consoles they play on, is that all too often gamers are left unable to play a game five years old, let alone over fifteen years old.That's so ancient in games terms, you might as well try plugging cave paintings into a flatscreen TV. The return of warmly-remembered titles, brought back for those who miss them, and those that missed them first time round, is not then a worry Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
As a genre, the "Match 3" puzzle game seems like a sort of evolutionary dead end. You can gussy it up with dramatic sound effects and sparkling animations all you want but ultimately it is still Candy Crush under there. Bear Winter takes a slightly different tack. Rather than letting you match more tiles for combos or adding powerups and special effects, developers Nevercenter have pared the gameplay down to a 3x3 grid on the one hand and added a light tactical and resource management element on the other.In Bear Winter you are a hunter. You go out every day into the frozen wilderness and try Read more ...
Helen K Parker
Ever wondered what would happen if a bunch of architects, prop-makers, fine artists, musicians and animators got together and decided to make a computer game? Well, if you’ve played any of the games created by State of Play, particularly Lume, then you’ll know the answer to that. You’ll also be as chuffed as I am that they have released a sequel to the aforementioned, and it’s every bit as exquisite as the first.Lumino City is a gigantic hodgepodge of reconstituted buildings, railways, train carriages, storage containers, boats and water wheels that precariously stretches into the clouds. Our Read more ...
Simon Munk
It's an exciting time to be a videogamer – the mix of big budget and independent titles, the opportunities increasingly offered by a wider variety of devices and streaming content, the sheer processing power developers have to work with. But what does emerge from this list is a lack of innovation in terms of enemy intelligence, emotional depth or narrative complexity. Perhaps we'll have to wait for 2016 for those…Game of ThronesEpisode one may have had a shaky start but Telltale know their stuff and the seeds have been sown for an epic gaming 'box set'. Stuart HoughtonBloodborneThe next game Read more ...
Simon Munk
The videogames industry is rapidly changing. Many of the best and biggest games of the last few years have come from tiny, independent studios – we're back to the days of bedroom coders and quirky ideas. But that doesn't mean there haven't been worthy big budget "AAA" traditional titles.Alien IsolationProbably the most interesting of the big budget titles, this first-person stealth game saw an unscripted, intelligent alien stalking you while you crawled through darkened ducts and hid under tables. Frustratingly difficult and ludicrously uneven – but genuinely terrifying. The most interesting Read more ...
Simon Munk
The best games of 2014 were often to be found not from the "AAA" videogame equivalents to Hollywood, but, of course, bedroom coders and small, independent teams. These are the best of the wild and weird "indie" games of the year…Minecraft Pocket EditionNot strictly a 2014 release but the updates that arrived in June/July finally turned an amusing diversion into a proper game, almost the equal of the fantastic desktop edition. For beginners – this is a collaborative and hugely powerful virtual Lego-a-like. Stuart HoughtonJazzpunkThe spirit of Hunter S Thomson haunted this surreal noir-on-acid Read more ...