Category: <span>Reviews</span>

Mass Effect 2 is the easy way out. It’s a cover-based shooter, through and through, ripping out and squashing most of the RPG elements that existed in Mass Effect – inventory management, a surprisingly exhaustive set of skills, armor types, armor mods – but BioWare never really executed any of that well. Instead of revamping […]

What we know conclusively after three of these expansions is that none of them are ever “minor” no matter how small their list of new features and tweaks. Practically every patch these days winds up breaking or fixing or re-breaking The Game in interesting ways that are never readily apparent but only appear after long […]

Here's something staggering: a game about the second World War, localized into English, that doesn't even pretend to appeal to a western audience by detailing the campaigns of western armies. Here's something even more staggering: a game about amphibious operations in the second World War that doesn't feature Normandy. To someone who grew up on […]

If the truth really is in the middle, then Operation Flashpoint 2 is the best shooter ever made. It comes extremely close to violating everything we are supposed to know about console shooters and PC shooters. The fact that it is still fundamentally a console game appears to be less of a case of its […]

Guerrilla partially deals with the issue that has dogged the earlier games in its series – which was their stubborn refusal to grant the player even a tiny fraction of the freedom implied by their environment-altering gimmicks. In the first Red Faction you were given the tools to alter the levels and then set basically […]

Had you followed Dragon Age: Origins during the last few months of its release, you’d have no idea that this is much more than just a game with an insatiable desire to cover itself in blood and sell itself with gratuitous sex.  I lost faith in the game months before release thanks to just how […]

Considering just how long Valve takes to make any kind of content, Left 4 Dead 2 should’ve taken 2 years to develop – 2.5 years tops.  So it’s a miracle how they’ve managed to shove in five campaigns, more than doubled the amount of weaponry, added in two new gameplay modes, and even rectified just […]

I doubt there is another genre dominated and defined by a single game like hack and slash is by Diablo. One sees the phrase 'Diablo clone' each time games of this type are announced, and they always end up being compared with what Diablo accomplished ten years ago. I believe, however, that the use of […]