Archive for the ‘PC Reviews’ Category.
Game companies usually don’t get do-overs. If there’s a bug or design flaw in a game, it stays there until the end of time. PC games often have the benefit of patches and mod communities, but these are after the fact and don’t always address the most glaring problems. Enter CD Projekt Red, developers of last year’s action RPG The Witcher; a promising but uneven title that, like many PC RPGs, felt like it needed a few more months in the oven. Determined not to let such potential fade into obscurity, CDPR rounded up the cast and crew, cleared their schedules, and took another stab at it with The Witcher: Enhanced Edition. The resulting package - free for download to those who already have the original - could show even crowd-pleasing stalwarts like Atlus a thing or two about keeping fans happy, and should be studied for years as an example of how real game fixes are done. Continue reading ‘The Witcher: Enhanced Edition - Staff Review’ »
Asda Story is one of the many free-to-play MMORPGs that have become available to English speakers in recent months. In this flood, having unique features is a great asset to a new MMO. In Asda Story’s case, this came not only in the form of its fairly unique in-game Soulmate and Sowel systems, but also in an advertising campaign that guaranteed the fun of players. Making guarantees and living up to them are two entirely different things though. Continue reading ‘Asda Story - Staff Review #2’ »
Hot on the heels of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Shadow of Chernobyl comes a prologue hyped to be everything last year’s unpolished, but memorable, first-person adventure was supposed to be. Clear Sky takes us back into the blighted Chernobyl exclusion zone, showing the events immediately preceding Shadow. The new gameplay elements have substantially expanded Clear Sky’s depth, and the sense of genuine adventure is as compelling as ever. However, the underlying weaknesses from Shadow again rear their ugly heads here, and the game is saddled with a few new setbacks to call its own. Continue reading ‘Blurring the Line: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky - Staff Review’ »
With a glut of free-to-play MMOs on the market, it isn’t easy for one game to stand out amongst the crowd, especially with so many of them using the same happy-happy theme. LaTale may be one more cute RPG out there, but it is definitely one of the higher-quality ones, featuring an entertaining combat system, a reasonable variety of character customization, and some great visuals and sound. The US release of this Korean-made game is a little under-featured, still missing a variety of fairly important sub-systems and a few critical areas and dungeons, but it is at least more or less bug-free and undemanding to run. Although marred by a few missteps, LaTale is a very solid casual MMO that should appeal to players looking for something easy and fun. Continue reading ‘LaTale - Staff Review’ »
Asda Story, perhaps most famous for its offer of $30 for those players who found it wanting during its beta period, is a game hampered by a large number of bugs, a very poor translation, and an uninspired overall design. Asda Story is one of the more “Me Too” free MMOs on the market today, offering bland combat, very basic quests, and little or no story. There are a few bright spots, as Asda Story does offer some unique variations on player interaction and sports an interesting visual style. But for the most part, Asda Story really shows its youth - there’s not enough content, not enough polish on the translation, and, at the moment, not a lot of reason to play it. Continue reading ‘Asda Story - Staff Review’ »
It has been rightly said that every book written represents the death of a perfect idea. This principle can easily be applied to video games, and perhaps none embody this like the obscure Russian first-person survival game Pathologic. With a haphazard English localization, a dated engine and very unforgiving gameplay, Pathologic lacks even the cult status to be salvaged from the bargain bin. The tragedy in this is that the game deserves a look by anyone who ever claimed to support the idea of video games as art, for few other games to date have been as bold, uncompromising and mature. Continue reading ‘Blurring the Line: Pathologic - Staff Review’ »
Ports are very often a point of contention among fans. An inferior port can leave would-be fans in the cold when it arrives on another platform, while one that’s clearly better or has a ton of extra features can earn the scorn of its established base. They can be resource intensive, requiring considerable recoding to transfer from one set of hardware to another, or to reconfigure controls. They’re risky, too - expensive gambles that the gaming public liked the game enough, or heard enough positive press the first time, that they’d be willing to buy it en masse again. To this atmosphere we have Mass Effect for the PC, a surprisingly positive example of how porting can improve the final product without changing the core experience. Continue reading ‘Mass Effect: Now in PC Flavor!’ »
Too often in western RPGs is ‘choice’ touted as a feature, either through customization of the main character or through the impact your decisions have on the game’s story. Almost as often that latter choice turns out to be hollow, picking between saving the village or burning it down and dancing a jig on peasant corpses. But sometimes you have a game that wields this correctly. Enter The Witcher, in which your decisions, and the consequences thereof, are one of the game’s strongest aspects. The rest, sadly, is just decent enough to stay out of the plot’s way. Continue reading ‘The Witcher - Staff Review’ »
If all we could discuss in a review are the facts, the nuts and bolts of a game, then S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Shadow of Chernobyl would have been dead on arrival. The long-delayed shooter from THQ and GSC Game World falters on too many technical points for one to fairly recommend it without a whole heap of warnings. However, when the topic changes to the ephemeral, to things like atmosphere, artistry, a sense of adventure, then any attempt to score it suddenly becomes far more complicated. Know at least this: for all its faults, you’ve never played anything quite like it, and may not for a very long time. Continue reading ‘Blurring the Line: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Shadow of Chernobyl’ »
“Bigger and mostly better” is one way to describe Oblivion, the fourth installment in the Elder Scrolls series. An ambitious and engagingly epic fantasy RPG, Oblivion improves on many of the problems its predecessors faced. The series’ hallmarks have always been big, sprawling worlds chock full of things to do and rich in detail, with the main plot almost as a side point to the adventures you have along the way. Oblivion capably carries this torch, and admirably gives its plot a stronger focus than that of Morrowind, the previous game in the series. For fans of the series it may be hard to shake the feeling that something’s been lost, but Oblivion does possess undeniable improvements to the gameplay that should appeal to newcomers and veterans alike. Continue reading ‘The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion - Staff Retroview’ »
Coming in on the heels of the popular Fallout RPGs, Fallout: Tactics was bound to confuse more than a few fans with its radical departure in gameplay and story. As a squad-based strategy game, Tactics feels closer to titles like Silent Storm or X-Com than its role-playing ancestors, with the Fallout license as essentially a coat of paint. Though it has its share of problems, and suffers simply by virtue of not being Fallout 3, Tactics is nonetheless a competent strategy game with an uncommon amount of content and depth. Continue reading ‘Blurring the Line: Fallout: Tactics - Staff Review’ »
It’s difficult enough for a video game to tackle the second World War without seeming stale and cliche; to remind us we’ve landed at Omaha beach before, and in better games. Compound that with the typical problems of an expansion pack - that they tend to retread the same ideas in the same engine featuring the same story - and you’ve got every reason to believe that Nival’s add-on to their sleeper hit Silent Storm is going to be underwhelming. Against all odds, however, Silent Storm: Sentinels is bolstered by the strong gameplay of its predecessor and brings enough new ideas to the table to keep the formula fresh - or at least from becoming too stale. Continue reading ‘Blurring the Line: Silent Storm: Sentinels’ »
The Role-Playing genre is rife with fantasy settings and medieval landscapes tailor-made for big, epic adventures. Less common are science-fiction tropes and plotlines, from space travel to grim, dystopian futures. But rarest of all are settings that explore the common ground between the two, that take a setting from one and inject a healthy dose of the other. Enter Arcanum: of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, Troika’s sprawling, open-ended RPG that stakes a claim in just such a setting, taking swords and sorcery and meshing it with steam engines and gunpowder.
Continue reading ‘Arcanum: of Steamworks and Magick Obscura - Staff Review’ »
In popular culture, portrayals of vampires as protagonists tend to swing towards the tragic. The dark, brooding anti-hero with the mysterious past and a serious case of ennui tends to be par for the course, but with Vampire: the Masquerade: Bloodlines, the tragedy has less to do with the characters in its story than it does with the criminal lack of stability in its code. Vampire: the Masquerade: Bloodlines is a game with some serious, serious issues, the worst of which will prevent a player from finishing the game, or even playing it at all. And this is a sad thing, because under the layers of bugs and seemingly unfinished sub-sections of the game, there is an unusually open, fairly well designed RPG to be played. Bloodlines has an interesting cast of characters, some solid voice acting, and a sense of atmosphere that, while somewhat cliché, still manages a few moments of genuine creepiness. Continue reading ‘Vampire: the Masquerade: Bloodlines - Staff Review’ »
Forget about a good chunk of what you’ve heard about Bioshock, the spiritual descendant of the System Shock games from the same people that made them (2K Boston, formerly Irrational/Looking Glass). Forget about what the box advertises and the developers promised, forget about entering a living world complicated by moral choices and topped with profound questions. Forget everything except the fact that it’s a great shooter with an interesting story and wonderful atmosphere, because that’s pretty much what you’re going to get. The final package is ultimately shallower than one might expect, but at the end of the day Bioshock is still a shooter worth the attention of anyone who likes a little intellect with their action. Continue reading ‘Blurring the Line: Bioshock’ »
World War II games are a dime a dozen these days, so normally it takes a unique hook or extremely skillful presentation to set a game apart from the pack. Silent Storm, a strategy RPG by Nival Interactive, has the good sense to try for both, and fortunately it usually succeeds. It is a game brought low by technical issues and a threadbare plot, but elevated to almost epic status by fantastic gameplay and almost unprecedented tactical depth. Continue reading ‘Blurring the Line: Silent Storm’ »
Let us take a long look at an oft-mentioned classic, the FPS/RPG hybrid that would inspire the recent hit Bioshock, and the not-so-recent hit Deus Ex.
Continue reading ‘Blurring the Line: System Shock 2’ »
Loading ...
