PC Reviews

Monday Night Combat – PC Review

Monday Night Combat is a third-person team-based shooter created by Uber Entertainment, previously released on Xbox Live Marketplace. Being a straight up console-to-PC port job, many believed that the transition would be harsh, but Uber has made sure those fears would be put to rest. Everything just comes together so well, making Monday Night Combat an easy game to recommend.

Gameplay is very interesting, combining a team-based attack/ defense game with a slight strategy element. Each team is given computer-controlled robots that must first be escorted into the other team’s base before they are able to tackle their objective. This adds an interesting layer of complexity to the team-based shooter mechanic, without making it too complex to the pedestrian player. The game is very well optimized and balanced to adjust to some of the skills, weapons, and abilities for the difference in control scheme. The classes are varied enough to give them each very specific roles, while still making sure to avoid redundancy. For example, there’s Sniper, the high-health close-range powerhouse Tank, in addition to the team-healing and robot-upgrading Support.

Dead Space 2 – PC Review

I was late to the game with the original Dead Space; I only played it a month ago in preparation for reviewing its sequel and I feel like an idiot for not jumping onto the Dead Space franchise as soon as it came out.  I absolutely loved the first one, and the second installment exceeds the original in many ways.

Breach – Review

We’ve seen a handful of downloadable multiplayer-only shooter games in the last year, such as Battfield 1943, Monday Night Combat, and the less-successful Blacklight: Tango Down.  Now there’s a new entry into this subgenre; Breach by Atomic Games.

Breach is a military game set in the present day.  It uses classes, with customizable equipment, an active cover system, unlockable perks, and highly destructible environments.  On the whole it feels like a combination of popular elements of other shooter games wrapped up in a new franchise, and well, that’s pretty much what it is.  But that isn’t necessarily a bad thing for shooter fans looking for their next conquest.

Dust Collectors- Dead Space 2

Winter Voices: Avalanche-Review

If action games can be thought of as interactive movies, and role-playing games can be thought of as interactive novels, then what sort of game might be thought of as an interactive poem?  The answer to that is a new independent game called Winter Voices by French developer Beyond The Pillars. 

Defy Gravity Review

Created by Paul Fischer, Defy Gravity is a space themed platformer with gravity manipulation at the forefront. No, it doesn’t use the gravity gun from Half-Life 2; rather, you shoot out “Gravity wells”. With a five dollar price tag and about 2-3 hours of gameplay, the value of Defy Gravity can only be validated by it’s gameplay. Which, I’m happy to say, is pretty great. 

Oddworld Munch’s Oddysee PC Review

Munch’s Oddysee was released for the original XBox back in November of 2001, and has just now been ported to the PC.  So, how does an XBox launch title hold up on the PC, nine years since its release?  Unfortunately, not well, and certainly not as well as the rest of the games in the Oddworld series.

Oddworld Stranger’s Wrath Review

The first Oddworld game showed up on the Playstation in 1997, and there have been three more games since then, not including the various handheld versions.  The most recent Oddworld game was Stranger’s Wrath from 2005, which was only available on the XBox.  That’s XBox 1 for you young’uns.  The first two Oddworld games were ported over to PC, but 2001’s Munch’s Oddysee, and Stranger, were only available on the XBox, and Stranger was never even patched to run on 360.  That’s why fans of cult games are so happy that all four Oddworld games have arrived on PC in one digital pack called The OddBoxx.

World of Warcraft Cataclysm Review

I installed Cataclysm with the expectation (Mostly based on previews and the already introduced interface and gameplay changes) that what I was getting into wasn’t exactly going to be an inspired work of art. Instead, it seems that Activision-Blizzard is heading down the path of least resistance, aiming to satisfy the most common denominator while weakening two of the greatest elements that made the vanilla so great: exploration and teamwork. Sure, lip service is paid to lore and the new zones are given a flashier face, but it’s clear that these sentiments are a façade for a hollow processor of souls that strain to escape them and return to the safe zone of their maximum levels and min/maxing number crunching. While Cataclysm adds a tremendous amount of new areas and material, it is all merely derivative and simplified: in other words, instead of stoking the imagination (although the new instances buck the trend), the game mostly personifies boredom.

Nail’d Review

In the industry today, there’s one genre that has been dominant for the past 5 years, and that is the First Person Shooter. This isn’t surprising, but due to this, many of the genres that populated the PS2 and Xbox era are now obsolete, and we rarely see a game in these genres. One of these genres is the ATV racer. During the days of the PS2, series such as ATV Offroad Fury were popular, and therefore, got support from publishers and developers. We’ve gotten attempts at replicating the successful ATV racer formula in games such as MX vs. ATV Reflex, but they’ve never captured what makes these games so much fun; the sense of barely controlling your vehicle at high speeds in fun tracks. Nail’d, a game by the creators of Call of Juarez, is another such attempt at recreating the ATV racer. While it succeeds in the gameplay of this genre, it lacks in content, making it a game for hardcore ATV racer enthusiasts only.