Metro: Last Light is the direct sequel to Metro 2033, and promises to fix all the complaints about the original while simultaneously looking drop-dead gorgeous and pushing your PC as far as it can go. Does it live up to the claims? Find out in our video review.

WARNING: Metro Last Light is rated R18+ in Australia. The following video contains scenes and language that are not suitable for viewers under 18.

Editor’s Note: At the time this video was being cut together, the FOV patch had not yet been released. It was made available overnight, and Steam users should update their game now to get it working.

A HD download of this review from our file library is coming soon.

Good:

• Drop-dead gorgeous
• Amazing atmosphere and attention to detail
• Great PC support (aside from the lack of FOV control)
• Meaty gunplay and clever mechanics

Bad:

• Ultra-linear and in love with its own story
• Bad voice acting, poorly-written characters
• Makes you crawl at a snail’s pace everywhere outside of combat
• Heaps and heaps of quicktime events and silly contrived situations

Rise of the Hutt Cartel, the first expansion to The Old Republic, was released last month with a promise of fresh content to play through and more carrots to chase by upping the level cap from 50 to 55. So, with the galaxy saved and level 50 reached, my character headed back to his starship, to find a holocall waiting for him. After a cutscene featuring a delightful action sequence with some training droids, and a conversation about the imminent destruction of Makeb, my giant green Jedi zoomed off to the newest entry in Star Wars lore.

Players on the Republic side are tasked with trying to push the titular Hutt Cartel off the planet Makeb and save it from a mysterious energy that is pulling it apart at its core. Much of the story quest is well written, and provides ample opportunity to leave people for dead, save villages, flirt with daughters and all the other things one expects from modern RPG dialogue.

Many of the new cutscenes are a treat, with panoramic shots of your starship, hammy action sequences and general Jedi awesomeness. RotHC works towards adding some excitement into the conversations of your main character, who in previous cutscenes has been mostly static.

In the background, the planet Makeb makes a passable effort towards providing some fresh scenery. Its horizon is lined with towering mesas, while the ground has plenty of jagged rocks, canyons and mercenary bases to stop you staring into the sky for too long.

Like all other planets in TOR, Makeb has a long, fully voiced storyline that takes you across the entire zone to complete its many objectives. But unlike other planets, Makeb does little to give you something to do in between these objectives. Normally, you’d have quite a few side quests with dialogue cutscenes, then whatever you had to do would be spaced roughly between your location and the major storyline’s next objective.

For some reason, BioWare Austin have decided to forgo this and instead place repeatable daily quests in each area. These are almost always issued with a text popup and seem to invariably involve accessing a computer console of some kind, because apparently space-faring races enjoy leaving computers out on the patio. These quests are relatively short and only repeatable once a day, which means that you’re required to spend a fair amount of time moving between objectives by just grinding through mobs.

If you’re lucky, you’ll have a bonus mission to give you some extra experience for killing them, but mostly you’re just grinding. This impersonal approach to side quests makes it hard to stay engaged with what you’re doing, as every story beat is followed by a mind-numbing mob-grind.

The new hope in RotHC is the addition of space binoculars macrobinoculars and scanner droids. These two new features come with brand new quest lines attached to them, both of which send you back to planets you’ve previously been on to find hidden items and new areas.

For example, the first quest for the macrobinoculars takes you back to Coruscant, a low-level planet, so you can search out droids and transmitters placed by a mysterious spy known as “The Shroud”. With a press of a button, you enter a first-person binocular view which allows you to zoom in on otherwise inaccessible places to scan the devices left by The Shroud. After finding all the objects in an area, you’re presented with a new objective that leads you to a hidden room inside a cantina. Here, you use the binoculars once again to solve a puzzle which finally allows you to confront one of The Shroud’s lieutenants. The addition of new, more puzzle-based questing makes for a really refreshing change in the TOR experience, and one which I’d like to see expanded on.

Alongside this new style of quest, RotHC also adds a fairly standard achievement system that rewards you with titles for completing some of the harder tasks, along with a range of class tweaks designed to remove previously unused skills and add additional ones for the five extra talent points players will receive. As well as these, RotHC offers new end game dungeons to take on with your guild — but as I’m not part of such a guild, I unfortunately can’t comment on their quality.

What Rise of the Hutt Cartel fails to add is an extension to The Old Republic‘s greatest selling point: its class quests. As I previously mentioned, planets in TOR had their own story that stretched over the time you spent in that area, backed up by a unique, fully voiced class-specific quest-line that stayed with you for your entire levelling career. I had hoped that RotHC would continue these brilliant class quests for another five levels, but I can only assume that budget constraints have forced BioWare Austin’s hand and prevented them from extending these. This makes most of the content feel more like an epilogue, rather than an extension to the grand story your character has participated in thus far.

With only the planet-wide quest and the new puzzle-style quests engaging me, and the grinding and lack of a personal story quest force-pushing me away, I found the expansion to be — for me, at least — wholly unnecessary. If you’re still playing and just eager for anything new to do on your max level characters, RotHC is worth looking into. But if you’ve previously left TOR and are waiting to see if this new content makes it worth getting back in, then this isn’t the expansion you’re looking for.

Good:

• Cutscenes are a step above the vanilla game.
• Planetwide story is fun, ample roleplaying opportunity
• New puzzle quests

Bad:

• No addition to personal story
• Gets very grindy at times

Rise of the Hutt Cartel costs $9.99 for subscribers and $19.99 for free players. You can buy it at the official SWTOR website.

This review copy of the expansion was provided by the publisher.

It took me a little while to warm up to Mars: War Logs. Somebody had described it to me as “the poor man’s Mass Effect”, and having enjoyed Mass Effect as much as I did, I jumped at the idea.

If you’ve heard that as well, forget it. You will have a better time.

Frankly, I get a much greater Fallout vibe from Wars: Mar Logs, and it’s not just the aesthetic. Vaguely diesel-punky in appearance, the game — believe it or not — takes place on a war-torn Mars. Different factions are duking it out for control of Mars’ resources and you are caught in the middle, in the POW camp of one faction.

I say ‘you’, but I really mean one of two characters whose roles you play. Confused? Let me explain. You run around, level up and make decisions as one Temperance, or Roy as he prefers to be called (or Space Elvis as I’ve taken to calling him). But his past is relatively unknown because the story, the cutscenes, the journal entries are all from the point of view of Innocence, Roy’s companion. It’s weird, and it threw me for a bit.

Also, Lars: War Dogs has sort of a virtue-name thing going on, if you haven’t noticed already. Mostly they appear to be ironic: Innocence for example is still young and naive, but has been to the front lines and has seen and done horrible things in the name of war (I also had a great time shouting, “Oh God, Innocence is DEAD!” every time he died).

There’s a lot to love about War: Lars Mog. The combat, for example, is interesting with equal parts strategy and button-mashing. On one hand, you’ll be mashing the buttons as fast as you can to get a hit. On the other, though, there are three buttons for melee, depending on if you want to break through someone blocking, say, or to keep an enemy on their toes. And when you’re fighting martian dogs, they can only take damage from behind — so they’ll come right at you, but you’re constantly evading, trying to get behind them.

It’s an interesting mix and it’s just challenging enough to keep you wondering: “Can I take this guy?”, and making it feel like a victory if you do. Having said that, there are some fiddly, annoying parts to the combat — so sometimes when you die it will be infuriating because COME ON, WHY DIDN’T THAT HEALTH INJECTION WORK ARGGGHH

When you’re dying a lot though, it’s probably not the games’ fault. It’s probably time to upgrade your gear!

I didn’t notice this feature for an embarrassingly long time, but in a way that was sort of a blessing. In your travels around Mars you’ll find yourself hoarding quite a collection of space-junk, metal, chemical components, that sort of thing. When you find yourself with a weapon or armour with upgrade slots, you can use this junk to upgrade your things, for example, adding a sheet of metal to your clothes to protect yourself, or a spiky head of nails to your iron bar to deal some more damage.

There is a substance called “serum”, which up to the point I’ve played, hasn’t really been explained. It’s some sort of biological substance — you can take it from fallen enemies, resulting in their deaths — but it’s also used as a currency, as well as for the creation of health injections. So you can use it to buy things, weapons, armour, health injections, but in a pinch you can use a lot more of it to make yourself a couple of injections to tide you over.

Related to this is your reputation. You gain reputation by generally being a good guy, doing quests in a nice way, and saying nice things. A great way to lose reputation quickly is to murder people for their Adam serum.

I enjoyed the questing system as well. For certain optional quests, War Togs doesn’t take the usual RPG approach where you either ignore a quest or take it and eventually succeed — you can actually fail them if you’re careless. Without too many spoilers, while trying to escape the POW camp, I had an optional quest to convince one of the more friendly guards who was fed up with the place to come along. The choice of the wrong dialogue option meant he wouldn’t be coming with us, along with all the changes to the story that that could mean.

It also opened up a completely different quest to poison him slightly to get him sent home. I’m a good dude like that.

I’ve focussed heavily on the good parts of this game. It took me awhile to warm to it, starting a bit slow and such, but in general I truly enjoyed what I played and really, the only negative aspects I came up with are fairly trivial. Things like the occasional spelling error, some fairly wooden voice acting and pretty dated visuals might mean more to you than an interesting storyline, and if that’s your bag, maybe this isn’t the game for you. It also has one of the worst cases of Invisible Wall Syndrome I’ve ever come across, and that can get pretty infuriating.

There’s a lot to love about Mars: War Logs: the setting, the combat, the way quests and conversation work. Unfortunately, a lot of it is hidden behind some questionable voice acting, dated visuals and poor animation.

If you’re looking for a solid sci-fi RPG though, with some really interesting elements, and can get past these fairly superficial obstacles, I would definitely give this one a shot. It’s not as fancy as your latest triple-A game, but hey, it’s also only twenny bux on Steam.

Good:

• Interesting setting
• Divergent, dynamically-changing quests
• Combat is generally satisfying
• Great value for the price

Bad:

• Voice acting is mostly poor
• Overall dated look
• Stiff animations

Mars: War Logs is $19.99 on Steam. This review copy was provided by the publisher.

Don’t Starve’s campfire should be the starting point of legends. In truth, it serves more utilitarian purposes —flickering warmth fighting winter’s grasp, defending against the horrors of the moonlit hours, and cooking device for a would-be Bear Grylls. Yet as history will tell, the campfire is also the place for stories, so good they’re told a million times, each variation grander than the last. And what better tool for story creation than a world of horrors and your own papercraft marionettes?

While Klei aren’t new to the frivolities of violence, their experimental curiosity-turned-community obsession in Don’t Starve is their most delicate creation, as if lifted from the very pages it was sketched on. Klei entrusts you with their papercraft pet, Wilson, and leaves you with a parting message. Don’t break it. Don’t kill it. And most of all, Don’t Starve!

What Klei also gives you is a sandbox, drenched in the macabre, brought to life in delicate lines and stood to attention like a pop-up book. It’s the kind of place likely to be written off as “Tim Burton’s Minecraft”, or “Sadistic Terraria”, or perhaps “Wilson in Wonderland”. Yet Klei’s line work has a charm all of its own — a life of its own — seen there in the wide eyes and hesitant expressions drawn to life on Wilson’s as-yet unbearded face. It’s all a picture of childish innocence, kept alive on a sadistic heart, pumping blood to each and every caricature.

The first time you lay eyes on the Tallbirds, tending to their nests and striding about with ease: an eyeball atop legs that tower above you. Your first night spent in near pitch-black darkness, surrounded by hordes of spiders, slave to your curiosity. Or the pigs and their little houses that recall nursery rhyme imagery even as you bludgeon them to death for the berries that grow in their backyards. For a world of 2D navigation and flat plains, it’s easy to fall head over heels and lose yourself in these fairytale forests.

Once the stage is set and the pieces begin to move, it’s a game of timid progress, resource gathering and accidental pyromaniacal tendencies. Much like Minecraft’s axe and torch, the campfire is an early invention cobbled together, there on the first night, but it isn’t one to be discovered on your own: Don’t Starve’s creations all arise from its crafting menu, where new recipes open as you construct scientific machines of wonder and wonderment, in an effort to twist and contort and work your magic to ensure this world spins on its 2D axis around you.

Yet as the nights pass by, the stories to be told become ones of busywork more than bewilderment. Its locales may expand breathlessly and with ease, but its ladder of a progress system forces you up with claustrophobic linearity. In that way all of Don’t Starve’s tales are doomed to begin and end in tragedy — in the gathering of familiar resources and the sudden strike of death — leaving the fleshy in-between to cultivate unique tales built on the randomness of its world and linearity of progress.

In truth, there’s too much of the latter and not enough of the former.

Before too long you see behind — and through — Don’t Starve’s paper-thin papercraft aesthetic, and once you know how its gears and levers bring its props to life, it becomes a less inviting place to be. The hunt for food turns to a search for the unique, in hopes of returning to the campfire with a story worth telling, while instead Mr. Minecraft is regaling onlookers with grandly built towers, and the Hollow Undead tell of demons defeated and fires kindled, in Miyazaki’s otherworldly realm.

For now this campfire is left to the frustrations of Wilson and his growing beard, and the tossing and turning nights of sleep playing host to dreams of what Don’t Starve could have been — or might one day become. And he’s worth cheering for — if for nothing else than an excuse to return to this pop-up book of wonder. Fingers crossed there’s a more exciting story to tell when we do.

Good:

• A pop-up book of a macabre nursery rhyme world, with a style that’s equally as charming as it is creepy.
• Opening hours of discovery and entertaining mistakes (Can anyone say burning down your own structures?) that may be enough to make a visit worthwhile.
• An ever-growing expanse of content: a developer open to feedback and six months of promised content and expansion.
• Wilson can grow a beard. Now that’s character progression.

Bad:

• The aesthetic wonder soon wears off.
• Little room for freeform approaches to familiar scenarios. Start, harvest, build, repeat.
• Blueprints are a blessing and a curse: less experimentation, less discovery.

Don’t Starve can be purchased for $14.99 on Steam. The reviewer purchased this copy at their own expense.

Greenheart Games’ debut title Game Dev Tycoon has received a lot of press lately, primarily for their inventive and undeniably ironic cracked release where piracy ends up bankrupting your fledgling game start-up. The company, started by brothers Patrick and Daniel Klug has set out with a mission to “develop games that are fun to play instead of mind-numbing money-grabbers”. An honourable endeavour – but how does the actual game fare?

Greenheart’s motto is: “Less social, less ville, more game.” How deftly ironic that the art style looks lifted from the pages of Farmville itself. The same greyed pastel faces on the same size avatars, with the same stiff character animation delivered on the same uninspired isometric maps. It seems in their rush to distance themselves from Zynga, they have come full circle and made their style exactly the same.

The similarities to Zynga don’t cease there. It seems, too, that they have accidentally copied their business strategy of cloning other, more successful games and passing them off as their own. Because as I played through the game I noticed a distinct wave of nostalgia for a game I played three years earlier — Game Dev Story, by Japanese firm Kairosoft.

You see, in the original Game Dev Story, you hire staff with varying ability in design and programming, before setting them to work on building a game. It’s different in the recent Game Dev Tycoon, where you hire staff with varying ability in design and programming, before setting them to work on building a game. Wait… did I just repeat myself?

Okay, well in Kairosoft’s game, you accrue research points to unlock different game genres and train your employees, with the occasional boosts to productivity which – watch out – could also generate more bugs. Whereas in Greenheart’s game, you accrue research points to… and boost… hmm, you do the exact same thing, I guess.

At least the cute naming conventions are original, right? The Sonny Playsystem? Ninvento Game Sphere? Hilarious. But not for a second their own concept.

Game Dev Tycoon does a thorough job of gutting the far more charming, far more original Game Dev Story – hanging the husk of its predecessor in exactly the same fashion as the alien from Men in Black wore the skin of that dead farmer. There is a line where a game is no longer inspired by, and in fact, a carbon copy of its predecessor. Game Dev Tycoon crossed that line, marked it as its own, and then had the cheek to scold people for pirating it.

Indie game development is afforded much more innovation than its commercial counterpart, and  it’s a crying shame to see one company cannibalise another’s creative endeavours. Poorly made knock-offs at least have the good graces to be cheaper than their legitimate counterpart — but with Game Dev Tycoon running a cost of $10, and the original game asking but $3 — I struggle to find even one point of difference in this rip-offs favour.

It’s best to leave the game to rate itself.

Good:

• Some plagiarised elements still maintain shreds of fun

Bad:

• Art is uninspired, regurgitated Zynga fare
• Trite, watered down and diluted gameplay
• Lame shoutouts to game development celebrities
• Game Dev Tycoon is bad and the developers should feel bad

Game Dev Tycoon is available on the developer’s website for $7.99. Game Dev Story is available on the Android and iTunes stores for $2.99.

The reviewer purchased both copies at their own expense.

If you didn’t play the first Zeno Clash, get your life together and correct your mistake immediately. It wasn’t the slickest game, but it was bursting with fascinating ideas and visual spectacle, and the sequel picks up the story from the first game’s conclusion, so it won’t make much sense if you haven’t played it.

What Zeno Clash 2 does most is turn up the scale. The original had disconnected, relatively small and linear environments, and focused exclusively on the story it was telling. The sequel, by contrast, delivers a semi-open world that dazzles with gorgeous and gargantuan vistas, and adds a scattering of side-missions, easter eggs and collectibles to reward exploring every nook and cranny.

Where the first game gives you its signature brand of high weird fantasy in concentrated doses, Zeno Clash 2 spreads out a buffet of spectacular landscapes that look like the architecture of Antoni Gaudi as viewed through the visual imagination of Hieronymous Bosch, or whatever other simile you choose for describing ACE Team’s unique mix of surreal and grotesque sights.

It’s this magnification where Zeno Clash 2 reveals its weaknesses. In the effort to make the sequel bigger and better, it seems to have lost some of the original’s focus. The brawling has changed from a precise system of short jabs, strong punches and kicks to use in a pinch, to an elaborate combo system with a power meter and special moves that must be memorised. But where the first game required specific tactics for specific enemies, Zeno Clash 2 lets you mash your way through almost every fight.

The exception is boss battles, most of which return to the first game’s cleverly-crafted encounters requiring specific tactics you’ll have to figure out for yourself.

However, the greatest sin this expansion leads to is one that strikes at the heart of what made the first Zeno Clash so compelling to play: simple familiarity robs many of the game’s elements of their weird charm and sense of wonder. What was startling when you first saw it is now safe and unremarkable, because it’s a known quantity.

This is especially true for the many locations and characters that Zeno Clash 2 revisits. The semi-open world puts those disconnected locations in a context that makes them seem more logical and less weird, and so many of the characters are made less opaque and inscrutable. In fleshing out the world, ACE Team have eliminated many of the spaces where the player’s imagination could run wild, spurred by the glimpses the first game offered.

Where the first game used Source, the sequel uses Unreal Engine 3, and the visual slickness so common among games using that engine adds to this impression: it’s almost as if the eye slides off the gnarls and knobbly bits that make ACE Team’s visual aesthetic so remarkable. And the addition of co-op is welcome, but designing for it means enemies are less distinctive and more prone to swarming tactics, as well as making a solo player reliant on sub-par companion AI.

The overall impression is of a delicious meal spread just that little bit too thin across less-interesting-but-still-tasty bread that threatens to overwhelm it. Zeno Clash 2 is not the sequel its predecessor deserves, but it’s still a worthy effort, and it’s a joy to get more of that wonderfully bizarre world.

Good:

• Bigger in every way, especially the wonderfully weird landscapes that now take on massive proportions
• More developed combat system
• Longer and more satisfying story, where the original’s felt a little unfinished

Bad:

• Familiarity breeds contempt for the wonderfully weird
• Expanded combat system makes the player a little overpowered

Zeno Clash 2 is available on Steam for $19.99. The reviewer purchased this copy at their own expense.

The folks at Paradox Interactive have never seemed concerned about being accused of ripping off other developers. The shortest, sharpest way of describing Leviathan: Warships would be to call it ‘Frozen Synapse with boats’. On the one hand, we prefer to champion fully original creations… but on the other, it’s like Frozen Synapse!

But with boats!

Leviathan’s naval combat pans out very similarly to Mode 7 Games’ masterpiece. You’re given a certain amount of time (depending on the game settings) to plan out what’s going to happen during the next ten seconds of action. You decide where to move your ships, whether to let them handle their guns themselves or aim them manually at specific targets, and whether to use defensive capabilities like shields and mines, before watching the actions that you and your opponents make play out.

You can plan turns ahead of time, but generally the team that loses is the one that doesn’t use their planning time as effectively as possible.

This is essentially a multiplayer-only affair, in that the campaign is all but unplayable alone. The missions don’t seem to scale for the amount of players, simply assuming that you’re going in with the maximum team of four players, meaning that even the first mission is very, very difficult alone (despite being an absolute cinch with even one other player). The campaign is largely being ignored by online players right now, despite its handful of exciting moments, so you’ll need to actively seek out other like-minded players if you want to play through it (and you’ll want the full four player experience, because it ramps up fast).

But campaign mode is only quiet because everyone has figured out that Leviathan’s greatest asset is its competitive multiplayer modes. The game is very much geared towards a competitive experience, which starts well before you enter the water. You’ll need to build at least three fleets, one for each potential size limit that can be imposed upon online games, because the defaults aren’t much good. This means that when you’re in combat studying your opponent’s moves and picking up new strategies is just as important as managing your own units.

This is particularly important because Leviathan’s weapons vary pretty wildly in effectiveness. Some weapons are so hard to accurately use that they’re all but useless (I’ve seen maybe one artillery strike land properly), while rockets are so ludicrously powerful that bigger ships barely stand a chance.

Despite this, Leviathan is a heap of fun when you hit across a good game. Two-on-two skirmishes across bigger maps are the best, but you may have to take whatever you can get, because right now matchmaking isn’t turning up many results. This may change once the game gets a tablet release, which is apparently happening soon, since Leviathan will allow for cross-play. It’s worth remembering, however, that Frozen Synapse is also out for tablets this month, and if forced to choose between the two we’d have to back the one we’re still playing occasionally two years after its release.

We were given a code for the in-game DLC, which opens up a few new map and ship options that enhance the game to such an extent that they probably should have been included from the get-go, even if they drove the price up slightly. The two $4.49 unit packs, in particular, will give you an edge in putting together your team, and it seems a bit unfair that the players who put down $10 for the game may find themselves at a disadvantage.

Still, for all its faults it’s hard not to be fond of Leviathan: Warships. It’s the sort of game where you feel yourself getting better all the time, where the online community is quick to support and make suggestions, and where being sunk by a fantastic flanking play is almost as exciting as sinking a ship yourself.

Good:

• A solid slice of multiplayer good times
• Planning and building your own fleets is enjoyable
• Seeing a strategy work out is exhilarating
• Very pleasant online community

Bad:

• Campaign isn’t balanced for single players
• Matchmaking isn’t returning many results right now (this may change once tablet versions launch)
• Day 1 DLC needs to be purchased for the best experience

Leviathan: Warships costs $9.99 on PC through Steam. This copy was purchased by the reviewer at their own expense.

In Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, you play a Mark IV Cyber-Commando named Rex Power Colt, and if that doesn’t tell you basically everything you need to know about what sort of game this is then I… really don’t know what else to tell you. Perhaps this video review will help you understand (sorry about the awful voice acting).

You can download this review in HD from our file library. A YouTube mirror is also available.

Good:

• Perfectly captures the cringe-worthy 80s action era
• Genuinely funny moments and one-liners
• Great (awful) voice acting
• None of the fluff or padding from Far Cry 3
• Same great PC support (FOV even goes up to 110!)

Bad:

• Only five or six hours long at a stretch
• No incentive to do anything else other than the main storyline
• Outside environment is boring and uninteresting to explore

You can buy Blood Dragon on Steam for $17.95. It is a stand-alone title and does not require the original Far Cry 3 to play.

This review copy was provided by the publisher.

Star Trek is the latest game in the series brought to us by developer Digital Extremes, just in time for the release of the second major movie. Players have the option of picking either Captain Kirk or First Officer Spock in this adventure, set between the 2009 feature film and the upcoming release of Star Trek Into Darkness. While my Trek exposure is limited to Voyager, the recent movie, and a few torrid fanfictions, that’s okay — an entrenched knowledge of the series is not a requirement to participate.

Fans of the television series have reason to pause, because this game follows the movie exclusively — and like most movie tie-ins, this is one mission you wouldn’t mind being on the away team for.

While on the Enterprise, you are sent to investigate a distress call on a power station nearby the Vulcan’s new home planet. Kirk, eager as can be, drags the reluctant Spock along to handle the matter personally, and it isn’t long before the first Red Shirt dies. The meandering tutorial drags on for nearly three hours as you are spoon-fed instruction after instruction, which is surprising, given many of later game components remain completely unexplained and are a won through trial and error.

The pacing does pick up later in the game, however, as you are introduced to the Gorn; beautifully designed militaristic lizards, and the focal point of you and your phasers for the remainder of the title.

From the start menu to the opening cutscenes, it is clear a great deal of love has gone in to recreating the characters faces to look like the stars of the movie. This, coupled with the dutiful attention to sound and voice-overs from the actors lends an authenticity to the look and feel of the game, and remains the highlight. The environment shows careful detail too, as cover visibly degrades and passive animals burst into gratifying messes.

As you progress, it becomes apparent that there is little in the way of variation between character models, with both main characters having the same broad squatting stance, as if ready to evacuate. There is limited variation in NPCs too, with the same models recycled throughout the chapters, and the quirky absence of any females after the first chapter.

The gameplay itself is reminiscent of Mass Effect, and not in a bad way. Levels are littered with cover and crawlspaces from which to shoot or stealth your way to victory, with the occasional puzzle to unlock doors or hack into turrets, and a few walls to scale in between. You are awarded bonus points for scanning various components around the levels, some of which are hidden and could, in theory, invoke an element of replayability… if it weren’t for the worst part of the game – the AI.

Both ally and enemy AI serves to undo all the attention paid to level design, with much of the cover rendered redundant when enemies fail to pathfind, and any sense of satisfaction from their dispatch notably absent — much like your AI partner, stuck on a platform a half level back. Problems with AI serve as the only real challenge in this game, as level restarts forcibly caused by your broken ally occur with increasing frequency, leaving you livid and ready to throw your monitor into the ocean.

Time seems to have been cut short for the developers of Star Trek as the release of the movie neared, choosing to ship something functional rather than fun — which is especially frustrating, given how close the game was to being good. At 10-15 hours of gameplay for $50, Star Trek remains a game to be sadly skipped, inadequate for both newcomers to the series and the die-hard fans.

Good:

• Character, monster and environment art are legit
• Authentic VO from the actors is delivered well
• Chris Pine still a major hottie

Bad:

• Awful AI turns mindmeld into facepalm
• Enemy pathfinding is tragic, wrecking stealth missions and leaving them easy shots
• Middling story which ends on an unsatisfying note after an arduous start
• Simply not worth the high price tag

Star Trek is available for $49.99 on Steam. This review copy was provided by the publisher.

The AMD Radeon HD 7990 is one of the strangest reviews I’ve had to write in quite some time. You see, the first dual-GPU Radeon HD 7990 was released “unofficially” by PowerColor way back in December of 2012. Then ASUS released the ARES II, another version of the 7990 living off a H2O diet thanks to its built-in water cooler. Yet it’s taken AMD several more months to get around to releasing the official version of the card.

Normally AMD comes first with a new product, then the others follow suit with their unique versions, so I’m most interested to see what happens when that procedure is turned on its head.

Both the PowerColor and ASUS cards were built on proprietary designs, but AMD’s 7990 is based on the new reference design, the template for all future 7990s. Unlike the other two cards, which could happily heat an igloo during a blizzard, AMD’s version of the 7990 is much cooler, with a TDP of just 375W — well down from the 500W seen on the first two. This dramatic drop in hot air blowing out the back of your case is possible because AMD can cherry pick the very best GPUs for its version of the 7990, and they’ve made sure their selected GPUs only need the slightest whiff of power to run.

It’s no surprise then that the huge triple fan cooler manages to keep everything cosy without sounding like a screaming cyborg baby, with basically whisper quiet operating volumes.

Strapped beneath the cooler are two Radeon HD 7970 GPUs, and they haven’t undergone the hobbling of the earlier Radeon HD 6990’s twin GPUs. All 8.6 billion transistors are present and accounted for, and they’re basically identical to the standalone 7970, with one slight difference; the maximum frequency is now 1GHz, rather than 1.05GHz. It’s a minor change, but it could result in slightly slower performance than a pair of Radeon HD 7970s in CrossFire.

There’s also a gargantuan 6GB of memory, but it operates as if it’s just 3GB while in action, due to the limitations of CrossFire (NVIDIA’s SLI has the same issue). Twin 8-pin power connectors supply the juice, and the entire package fits into a dual slot package, far smaller than the four slots required by twin graphics cards. At a hefty 12 inches it’s even longer than Dirk Diggler though, so you might have to move some hard drive bays around to squeeze it in.

If you just happen to have five monitors lying around the house – don’t we all? –the 7990 will happily power them all simultaneously. The four mini-DisplayPort and DL-DVI outputs at the rear of the card provide AMD’s excellent Eyefinity technology, the undisputed choice for multi-monitor mavens. When the card is not in use, AMD’s new Zerocore power technology can shut down one entire GPU, as well as the fans cooling it, helping to deliver a respectable idle power use of just 20W.

In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s a whole heap of power on this graphics card. The Radeon HD 7970 uses arguably the fastest affordable GPU on the planet right now (the NVIDIA GTX Titan doesn’t count, as its insane price means that only the world’s reclusive Trillionaires, living in secret bases on the moon, can afford it), and the 7990 has two of them. Before we look at how this behemoth runs though, I need to discuss a problem that has become a real issue for AMD over the last couple of months – stuttering.

As any AMD CrossFire user can tell you, playing games with twin AMD cards results in noticeable hitching or stutters, and it happens as often as every few seconds. Unfortunately it’s not detectable by our usual frames-per-second benchmarks, so NVIDIA came up with an incredibly complex procedure called FCAT that can measure the issue precisely, spitting out graphs that would confuse a mathematics professor. Obviously they didn’t do it out of the goodness of their hearts – they did it to show that their dual-GPU method (SLI) doesn’t suffer from the issue.

I don’t have the $2000 video capturing machine required to run FCAT yet, so I had to resort to a much simpler, yet no less useful, method of detecting stutters – I played games with the 7990. Gasp! I often don’t have time to play games properly with the cards I’m testing, but with stuttering being such a huge issue for AMD at the moment, it was the only way to detect if the 7990 had the same problem of CrossFire’d 7970s.

Unfortunately, stuttering was present in every game I played. As an NVIDIA SLI user, it’s a very annoying issue that I haven’t seen before, and it happens even when the frame rate is well into the hundreds. I’d go so far as to say that it’s a show-stopper of a problem until AMD fixes it, but luckily it looks like a solution is on the way. AMD supplied special drivers that attacked the problem, and it definitely helped the issue, if not quite cure it entirely.

Sadly, there’s no indication of how long it’ll take until these are released to the public, and it’s likely they’ll cause a performance decrease.

Now that I’ve got that nasty business out of the way, I can talk about the benchmark results. I ran the game in several recent games against its direct competitor, NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 690, and the performance was overall slightly better than NVIDIA’s card. The lead was never huge though, with even the biggest gap being just 9%. Note also that these results used AMD’s latest public beta drivers, and not the special stutter-killer set, as per AMD’s requests.

I also didn’t have the hardware to measure performance against dual Radeon HD 7970s, but by all accounts the 7990 is about 10% slower. Considering it’s about $300 more expensive, you might be wondering who would bother with the 7990? For starters, it’s definitely quieter than twin 7970s in action, something that speaker users will value greatly. Secondly, it only needs two slots inside your case, rather than the four of a CrossFire user, which could be a major boon for those with cluttered cases. It also comes with eight kick ass games, which helps to lessen the blow somewhat.

Finally, it is possible to run twin 7990’s in CrossFire, but you’ll probably need a small fusion reactor to power it.

If AMD could iron out the frame stutters, I’d have no qualms in recommending this card to those who want the fastest single-card, dual-GPU solution on the planet. Unfortunately these stutters come with AMD’s latest public drivers, and they’re ruining the gaming experience. So instead might I suggest a case of wait and see; if AMD resolves the issue entirely – and games.on.net will tell you if and when they do – only then will it be the time to go and blow your credit limit. It should only take a month or two before we know one way or the other, which can feel like aeons to somebody wanting to upgrade, but in this case patience is the most prudent option.

Good:

• Strong performance, edging out NVIDIA’s 690 in most games
• Low TDP
• Very quiet
• Only takes up two slots in your case

Bad:

• Super-annoying stuttering bug is still present (though hopefully solved soon)
• Slower and more expensive than twin 7970s

Eador: Masters of the Broken World (or just MOTBW for short) sounds like the kind of game a fan would dream of. Take all your favourite games of a particular genre, cherry-pick some of the best elements, put your own twist on it and voila! You have your own perfect game.

That’s what Eador: Genesis, envisioned from a prototype made by Alexey Bokulev, was anyway. But as the developer admitted, 2D games on their own just don’t sell anymore. So Bokulev teamed up with Snowbird Games to bring Eador into the modern age with Masters of the Broken World.

Bokulev’s favourite games included Civilization, Heroes of Might and Magic and Master of Magic, and that’s pretty much what you get: a broad turn-based strategy featuring paladins and demons, imps and elves, priests and minotaurs, castles and dungeons, resources and towns, vampires and ghosts while you battle to control the universe.

MOTBW just might be one of the most ambitious fantasy turn-based strategy titles in years.

Familiar, but different

Probably the biggest difference between MOTBW and other fantasy turn-based strategy games are the shards, which act like disconnected pieces of land (think the floating islands from Avatar, but in outer space instead of Pandora). Your megalomaniacal avatar (who hires mortals for the grunt work) battles for control of the Astral against other heroes, moving from one intergalactic shard to the next.

Each shard is a planet of its own, complete with enemy heroes, strongholds to be captured and provinces to be explored. Each conquered shard gives you additional resources and bonuses in combat, while unlocking more buildings.

Provinces are fortified as well, but their capture is essential early on since they generate gold and gems (used for spells, magical items and certain troops) for your empire. The trick is picking your battles and knowing which enemies to fight, since keeping experienced armies alive is crucial to victory.

The problems start with picking the right unit mix: the stronger the unit, the higher the upkeep. But stronger units have weaknesses too, and your army needs to be balanced enough to fight a wide range of opponents.

Managing provinces properly is equally important and it’s where you’ll spend most of your time.  After bedding down your newly acquired citizens, you’ll be tasked with keeping them fed and happy. An unhappy populace tends to revolt, which you can quell by hiring some militia. Militia can be bribed though, and after a revolt they can also be easy pickings for an enterprising opponent.

A major influence on the happiness of your people, and your relationship with the AI, is determined by the choices you make throughout the game. Every now and again you’ll be faced with a random encounter, ranging from adventurers wandering through your lands to a giant spider attack to establishing trade routes.

The morality system is fairly simple, although its influence throughout the game, which includes determining whether certain provinces will allow you to move through their borders for free, add an impressive touch. It dovetails nicely with the alignment of the armies themselves, which relies on the good/neutral/evil mechanic seen in the HOMM series and others.

Morale isn’t something you’ll pay much attention to initially, but once the fights scale up it becomes an important influence. Troops gain or lose morale depending on the alignment of those they fight with, and they lose or gain morale during battle depending on what happens to the units around them. If a group of archers surrounded by a bevy of allies suddenly dies, the morale of all adjacent troops is lowered. It’s an important mechanic to master because some enemies are too powerful to kill directly, but you can win by demoralising them until they abandon the fight.

The battlefield itself influences your troops, with hills, swamps, forests, and mountains affecting the mobility, range, defence, attack of your units. There’s a little bit of luck in combat too, with the game giving you the option to arrange your battlefield formation before the fight starts. Occasionally the enemy formation is visible, but most of the time it’s hidden, which means you’ll have some fights where you accidentally put yourself on the back foot.

A universe of action

The tactical complexity is staggering, and you’ll quickly get absorbed in micromanaging your empire on several fronts. Random encounters begin appearing once your influence grows, and you’ll be asked whether you want to give gold to a local healer who saved a tribe, or whether you want to tax an incoming caravan. Bandits might take over a province and allow you free access — but doing so will reduce the province’s morale and prospective income.

Your income accumulates across shards as well. When you choose to invade a new shard, you can transfer gold, gems to the new world, and whether you want certain bonuses to apply, such as a particular starting building or something in your treasury. Transfers aren’t unlimited, but the extra touch is impressive.

One massive bonus is MOTBW’s favour is that the shards in each campaign are randomly generated. The difference this makes cannot be understated, since a cornerstone of the campaign relies on the way you deal with your fellow demigods. If you’re lacking the resources for a big fight, you might decide to remake yourself more in the image of your opponent to gain their trust. That influences how the provinces relate to you, which affects their mood, the random encounters generated and so on.

But ambition comes at a cost, and fans of the original Eador have cause for complaint. While all this scope is brilliant for players new to the series, it’s nothing different than what was in the original Eador: Genesis. The gameplay is unchanged and the interface, at least on a functional level, identical.

The wheel building menu for strongholds, for instance, is hardly the most user-friendly design. Games like this demand that you plan several steps ahead, and even the advanced building menu is visually convoluted.

Another bugbear is that combat takes too long to resolve due to the attack animations, which are slow and cumbersome even on the fastest game speed. One saving grace is that you can issue new commands from separate troops while the animation for the unit prior resolves, but you have to wait for the previous animation to resolve before you get updated info about the current attack.

Bugs, bugs and more bugs

My frustration with the attack animations, however, was nothing compared to the game-breaking bugs I experienced elsewhere. The day Eador was released, the game was virtually unplayable. The tutorial refused to progress beyond the second movement phase with most hero types.

Understandably, Snowbird released a patch to correct the issue, but…  the updater was broken as well and wouldn’t install, stopping me from loading the game. By Wednesday — almost a full week after release — I was finally able to play the game. That is, until I decided to try the multiplayer. Your game is out of date, I was told. Fine, I’ll just download another patch.

Well, the patch downloaded just fine. It just doesn’t install properly. Luckily, I’m able to cancel the launcher and resume the campaign and custom game modes, which is nice, but still horrendously inept. Still, it means I wasn’t able to test the multiplayer, and hotseat games are currently disabled until another (probably broken) patch is released.

I couldn’t let this review pass without mentioning the sheer incompetence of this patching process. I wanted to spend the whole weekend playing Eador so the review would be ready by the middle of the week, except it took until the middle of the week before I could see the bloody menu screen.

Equally annoying was an email I received on Wednesday from a PR firm announcing MOTBW’s release and the availability of review codes. You know, after those major, game-breaking bugs. The ones that people who actually spent their hard-earned cash had to put up with.

An afternoon delight

Annoyances aside, I’ve quite enjoyed my time among MOTBW’s various shards. I was furious initially and was nit-picking to the extreme, enraged by a comedy of errors that should have been spotted by even the most moronic programmer.

But after several hours, I began uncovering the game’s complexity, morale system and the web of choices that go into every decision. What was promised was delivered: a combination of all the best turn-based strategy games you know and love from the past with an entertaining twist of its own.

The interface can certainly use some work. Fans of the original will probably upset at having to pay USD $20 for nothing more than a HD remake — although it’s a vast improvement on the original, and a fairly decent, although not spectacular, effort as far as graphics are concerned.

You could easily burn away hundreds of hours among the many shards of MOTBW, if you can forgive the mistakes above. They certainly won’t be the last errors to be corrected over the next few weeks. But underneath the cracked, ugly shell lies a rich, colourful and entertaining turn-based fantasy strategy that gamers should take the time to explore.

Good:

• Layer after layer after layer of decision making
• Solid tactical combat
• A level of complexity that old-school PC gamers will love
• Randomised campaigns!

Bad:

• Bugs galore
• Combat animations occasionally out of sync, and they take too long
• Not as simple as some of the genre’s predecessors (King’s Bounty etc.)
• Nothing new for fans of Eador: Genesis

Eador: Masters of the Broken World is available on GOG.com or Steam for $19.99.

The reviewer purchased this copy of the game at their own expense.

Monaco: What’s Yours Is Mine has a lot to live up to. Revealed in 2010 by creator Andy Schatz, this indie stealth adventure managed to beat out Super Meat Boy and Fez at the IGF Awards that year, and has been winning the hearts of festival attendees ever since. We’ve been waiting for Monaco for what seems like an eternity, and one has to ask themselves, was it worth the wait?

Yes. Absolutely, yes.

In a nutshell, Monaco has players pulling off a number of elaborate heists in the French-speaking city of, err, Monaco. Completing these heists is often easier said than done, as your ragtag gang of criminals sneak their way past guards, dogs, gun turrets and even seagulls. There’s also automated defence systems, computers to be hacked and plenty of locked doors. The odds are stacked against you, and more often than not you will find yourself in utter chaos rather than organised perfection.

There are eight loveable criminals to control, each with their own personality and special ability. There’s The Lockpick, who can unlock doors and safes quicker than the rest, you also have The Gentleman who is an expert at disguises and hiding in plain sight. The Cleaner is an endearing psychopath who uses a chloroform-soaked rag to send guards to the sandman, and The Mole can dig through most walls with his trusty spoon (gotta love that FREEDOM SPOON).

Action is viewed from a stylish top-down perspective, showing the basic floor plans of the area you are attempting to break into. However, players can only actually see within their line-of-sight, meaning that everything else is greyed. This leads to a lot of sneaking, and forces you to memorise patrol routes and locations of exits and passages. Knowing that there is an unlocked air duct on the left side of the library could be the difference between life and death if you are spotted by a rambunctious guard.

You also have access to a number of items to help you survive these heists. There are powerful shotguns, crucial bandages to heal yourself, smokebombs to confuse and EMP grenades to shutdown entire defence networks. Learning how to use these items effectively is crucial to success, especially in the hectic multiplayer modes.

It’s interesting to see just how different Monaco plays when throwing other players into the mix. Single-player often had me scrutinising every move, slowly making my way through the areas, collecting all the gold coins and executing my plans with minimal mistakes. When playing with three buddies, or strangers via the internet however, it was sheer and utter chaos. And it was awesome.

The game becomes far more strategic when playing online: learning how to maximise efficiency based upon your character’s skills will often make or break a team. The Lockpick will often take the lead, unlocking doors as quickly as possible, while the cleaner sneaks his way around picking off guards with his dirty rag. The Hacker jacks into the computer terminals, sending computer viruses around to break down defences, and The Redhead distracts guards so the rest can make a run for the exits.

That’s how it should work, but more often than not it ends with voice chatter along the lines of “Nick, don’t trip that…” *alarm sounds* “too late, RUN!”.

While pulling off a heist flawlessly provides a rush, this chaos is where Monaco truly shines. Relying on your memory of exits and items when being chased by guard dogs and people with crossbows is next to impossible, making you feel like you just fell in the deep end and you can’t get out. I imagine that’s what a real heist would feel like, and Monaco conveys it in such a way that it becomes hilarious and daunting at the same time.

It would have been easy enough for Pocketwatch Games to provide the eight characters, a set of heists and just let players run wild in the world of Monaco — however they have provided a story that sets the tone and perfectly paces players through the many systems of the game. Starting out with just four characters, players are taken on a journey that will take them from the prisons of Monaco, to an expensive yacht, to the HQ of a security firm and beyond.

The beginning of the story is told in The Lockpick’s timeline. Yet I soon discovered that if you collect all the gold coins on any given level, it becomes cleaned out, which unlocks a new level on the next character’s timeline.

“What the hell is this?” I said to myself, realising that The Pickpocket now had a variation of the second level of the game in his timeline.

Opening it up, I expected nothing more than a reversed version of the level I played previously, with harder guards. Instead I was given new context to the story, an entirely new layout which showed what that character was up to while the others were gallivanting in the night, and it brought an entirely new dimension to the story.

Monaco employs an interesting visual style, sitting right on the edge of pixel art which is so hot right now, and hand-drawn maps. Not afraid to use bright colours, it creates an immediately recognisable style that is distinctly Monaco. The soundtrack is stellar, providing a number of piano-based tunes that bring in an old-timey feel as you are being chased by those pesky guards. But of course, when it’s provided by Austin Wintory of Journey fame, you know it’s going to be good.

Monaco is insanely chaotic, and I love it. While pulling off the perfect heist may be the goal of this classy stealth darling, when a plan falls apart and your buddies are screaming with laughter, it truly shines. Clever writing, great mechanics, a visual flair and strategic elements pull this into one cohesive package. I can easily say Monaco is the most fun I’ve had with a videogame in years.

Good:

• Amazing co-op experience
• Great selection of characters with different skills
• Fantastic stealth mechanics
• Fun and welcoming rather than brooding and dark

Bad:

• Can be a little confusing for newcomers
• Can’t play online with two or more people on the one PC

You can purchase Monaco either on Steam for $15, or directly from the developer to get a DRM-free copy AND a Steam key at the same time.

This review copy was supplied by the developer.

Techland seem to think they can breathe new life into the mutated, infected and somewhat overplayed zombie genre with their new game, Dead Island: Riptide — a spin-off of the original title in which you play the role of a survivor immune to the zombie virus, trying to escape yet another island. While the first game was fresh and lively, the sad truth is that the new game seems like a tired old clown performing the same old tricks in the hope of a new laugh.

The game banks heavily on you having previously played Dead Island, to the point where it’s basically a requirement if you want to follow along with the relatively bland story — and even though I finished the first game, I still had to go back to remind myself who some of the characters were and why I (still) shouldn’t give a toss about them. Many of the games’ basic activities aren’t explained and require a familiarity with the last game for you to even know about, especially things like modifying weaponry and utilising the fast travel system.

There are numerous problems with the game, apart from the fact that there is almost no improvement or innovation over the previous title. Many of the original grievances have been kept in, including a clunky ‘console friendly’ interface, a number of poorly-explained skills (one skill tells you to press both mouse buttons simultaneously, but you actually have to press them in sequence), and sounds that are frequently mismatched, such as the one involved every time you jump on a zombies face. Leaving a cave spouts reams of spontaneous and frequently wrong dialogue, and anytime you come back to the game you have to sit through it displaying every quest you’ve decided to go on.

If the games’ only let-down was that it didn’t focus on fixing previous issues, or didn’t add enough new content to make it worth playing, it could almost be forgivable. However Dead Island: Riptide also decides to drag you on a long, arduous, frustrating mission chain that will have you going around and around in circles, with no real progress and next-to-no fast travel options in sight. It’s certainly lengthy, but that length feels incredibly forced, unnatural, and ultimately boring. The sheer amount of copied-and-pasted areas doesn’t help to this overall feel.

It’s not all old and rusty, however. The game performs just as well as the first, and there are a smattering of new features such as the ability to perform small team quests (usually simple item fetches) that level up your team members and shopkeepers. There are defense quests that have you defending your territory, and are an enjoyable improvement to the game, especially in multiplayer. Multiplayer has had a few tweaks, and I found joining and leaving games both fluid and easy.

The game is (still) a perfectly competent zombie beat/shoot em up, and it’s almost as fun as the first experience was. But that said, a lack of an improved feature set, a frustrating quest line, and dialogue you’ve heard many times before (just how many times can Sam B throw the f-word into a sentence, anyway?) make Dead Island: Riptide seem like a repetitive chore — or worse, an underwhelming DLC masquerading as a fully-fledged game.

Good:

• If you enjoyed Dead Island, you’ll enjoy this
• Because it is exactly the same game

Bad:

• No real improvement or innovation
• Demands familiarity with the previous title
• Not enough new content to justify the price ($70)
• Frustrating, boring and full of padding
• The same issues and complaints, still unfixed from the first game

Dead Island: Riptide is $70 on Steam, or $40 on Green Man Gaming instead. This review copy was supplied by Deep Silver.

The announcement that Dishonored’s first DLC would be a bunch of skill tests and time trials was a bit of a disappointment. Many of us were hoping for a return to the world of Dunwall, and with so many interesting and spare NPCs kicking around it seemed a shame that they weren’t grabbing the bull by the horns straight away. But time passes, development continues, and now we find ourselves in the shoes of Daud, master assassin, ready to explore more of the world of Dunwall once more. So let’s get to it.

The Knife of Dunwall is the first part of a two-part story, set to conclude in The Brigmore Witches, and so it ends on a kind of confusing high point with a twist reveal that was telegraphed a mile away, and the sudden appearance of a new big bad guy whose bigness and bad-osity is never adequately explained. In other words, the story is messy and bit poor — but Dishonored, however, is not (and never has been) a game about story — it’s a game about perfecting the stealth kill, eating every tin of eel meet you find, and soaking in the atmosphere of the gorgeous world of Dunwall.

The first of the three levels on offer is set in a whale slaughterhouse, and finally brings us face-to-entrails with the creatures who power so much of Dishonored’s dystopian majesty. It’s a bloody, disgusting affair, and you’ll spend a lot of it crawling through sewer tunnels and runoffs filled with blood and intestines, and hiding from guards behind enormous whale carcasses. Near the end of the level you find a whale still breathing while it’s being hacked apart, and in the process of discovering what all the switches in the room did, I accidentally electrocuted it and killed it.

Strangely enough, this was the only time in the entirety of my Dishonored play (including the original) that I’ve ever actually felt bad about killing something — even though it was a mercy killing.

I don’t know what that says about me, but let’s move quickly on: the first level is easily the best, with the final two levels either heavily drawn from the first game or simply re-used wholesale, and while it’s great to be playing through a familiar space from an alternate perspective, it feels like The Knife of Dunwall opens on a high and goes downhill, rather than building to an epic cliffhanger conclusion.

When we first came across Daud in Dishonored we all of course immediately pegged him as an anti-Corvo, and so he’s a perfect fit for viewing the world through a darkened lens. Daud, unlike Corvo, already has an established character — where Corvo is a blank slate for you to write your own personality, Daud (we’re told) is a ruthless killer. So while I initially began the game in my traditional Corvo fashion as a ghost, I quickly found myself wanting to play more into the role Arkane had written for Daud and ended the game as a blood-spattered monster with a three-figure kill count.

Daud’s abilities seem to play more into this persona: with the ability to summon assassins and deploy disintegrating arc mines, it’s easy to think that Daud is a man for whom the most expedient option is the ideal one. This is a bit strange really, because with only three levels in the game if you decide to go in with guns blazing then you’re going to blitz it in maybe an hour or two at the absolute most. I opted for a stealth assassination approach and managed to draw it out to six hours of gameplay, which is a goddamned bargain at the $10 price point Bethesda are asking for.

The major difference between Daud and Corvo (aside from the skillset) is that Daud actually takes the time to speak to people upon occasion, which would have been fine except that voice actor Michael Madsen at times genuinely sounds confused and weirded out by the lines he’s being asked to read, almost as if he’s not sure he’s even in the right recording studio. With the amount of hesitancy in his voice it’s not hard to imagine that each recording session actually began with Arkane bursting into his bedroom at three in the morning, thrusting a script into his hand and yelling “Read this! Read it now!”.

He’s supposedly a man on the search for redemption, but at the end of the day all of his deep soul-searching doesn’t get in the way of him slaughtering everybody he meets and, when you come right down to it, there’s absolutely no motivation to behave in any other way than the one you find the most entertaining. I’ll take the arc mines, please.

In addition, while there are some neat new enemy types and the gameplay boasts the same level of superb flexibility as ever, The Knife of Dunwall also unfortunately includes the same annoying, stupid bugs as the original which I’d desperately hoped would have been ironed out by now. Guard bodies still disappear for literally no reason (I filled a rubbish bin with five corpses and when I came back with the sixth, they’d all disappeared) and living guards still teleport in out of nowhere for no reason at all. At one point in the first level two butchers came at me out of an empty room, and in the second level I was confused to see three guards come charging at me from the top floor of a building which I knew was empty and had no other access points. It’s just silly, and it breaks the immersion.

Ultimately, The Knife of Dunwall is a great piece of DLC that actually provides an interesting parallel narrative, and manages to expand on the main game without feeling like a hollow cash-grab. If you liked Dishonored, well, you’ll like this — and for a mere ten bucks, you can get yourself a few more hours of the same open-ended fun that made the first game so damn good. It’s not as impressive as it could have been and the story feels rushed, but it’s enough to get me excited for what’s to come.

Good:

• Only $10
• Interesting new enemies and power sets
• Daud actually has a voice and personality
• Same high level of open-ended sandbox gameplay
• Sets up next DLC nicely

Bad:

• Only 3 missions long
• The story is as shallow as ever
• The same stupid bugs with bodies disappearing and guards teleporting in
• You still can’t do a non-lethal drop takedown

Review product supplied by Bethesda.

Discussions around accessibility and exclusion within videogame culture have been an important part of the medium’s critical and academic discourse, driving development in recent years with the introduction of more accessible control schemes and a burgeoning ‘casual’ market. Evoland could have fit neatly within this simple, ‘casual’ space, with its easy puzzles and simple gameplay — except for the fact that it is aimed exclusively at people who love games so much that the mere mention of Mario in a pop-cultural context sends them into fits of ecstasy.

Evoland is an RPG that shifts between gameplay and graphics modes as you’re going, starting off as a monochrome GameBoy-esque adventure with extremely limited movement and eventually embracing full HD. The transitions come thick and fast early on – you’ll encounter a chest that upgrades the game every few seconds, it seems – but after the first hour or so the game seems to settle into a model it’s actually comfortable with, primarily jumping between Final Fantasy-styled over worlds and dungeon areas reminiscent of A Link To The Past for its remaining two hours.

That the game fails to actually match either of these classics practically goes without saying. In fact, it often feels as though Evoland’s primary goal is to remind you that other, significantly better games exist.

When you’re out in the field using a Final Fantasy-inspired (but exceptionally limited) turn-based system to take down enemies that are obviously mutated forms of Mario Bros’ Goombas and Koopas, it’s hard not to feel a little uneasy about the ways Evoland is pandering to you. It’s a game designed with the same sensibilities as modern day Family Guy episodes — it’s enough to simply reference things that have come before without bothering to engage with what actually made them compelling, because apparently that’s how comedy works. Combat in the Zelda-styled dungeons is a total chore, and the game is bereft of puzzles worth solving.

That’s not to say that Evoland fails completely at everything it tries. The later levels show a bit more spark than earlier sections; one dungeon’s Diablo-esque combat raises a smile that actually lasts longer than a few seconds, and another section that involves switching between time periods succeeds as the only part of the game that truly feels like an original idea. In too many other instances though, Evoland seems almost deliberately tedious, jumping between satire, parody and blind reverence with little thought for what the difference between them is, and wrapping everything around systems and story beats so bland and free from commentary that it starts to feel like the developers forgot what they wanted the game to be.

Evoland is a long retelling of an average joke that you’ve already heard the punchline for. The logical endpoint would have been to shoot off into the future, to confront the player with the notion that they weren’t yet ready to experience what’s coming next (it would have been fantastic if the game simply ended by informing you that your computer wasn’t capable of running the final level). But for a game all about evolution, Evoland doesn’t actually seem the least bit interested in evolving past tropes that are already on their way out.

Good:

• Occasionally transitions and gags raise a smile.
• One later section involves a neat time-switching gimmick.
• A few genuinely neat references to some old favourites.

Bad:

• It never establishes its own identity.
• Lots of tedious, boring fights.
• Never develops its own systems to the point of being interesting.

Evoland is available for $10 on Steam. This review product was purchased by the author at their own expense.

It’s almost a year since I previewed Shootmania: Storm. Back then, the only local server was some charitable fellow’s ADSL connection. It was still the closed beta, and there was much potential to be fulfilled. But time does not guarantee progress, and while a glimmer of hope exists for Shootmania to assume the mantle of what could have been, all available evidence suggests otherwise.

Like the rest of Nadeo’s catalogue, the answer was always going to lie in the community and its potential to harness the tools given to them. Nadeo weren’t responsible for the crazy and wacky tracks that made Trackmania Nations special. That honour belongs to the fans. So provided there’s a willing soul, there’s nothing stopping Shootmania versions of de_inferno, Backlot, Blood Run or Turbine from emerging on the internet.

The game has been out for long enough. Shootmania entered open beta in February, and was available to the public well before then. Coverage for Shootmania started popping up around May and the game was playable at various trade shows; Australians had their opportunity at EB Expo last year with a casual-style tournament run by ESL.

Around 20 teams are active in Australia as a result of the very lengthy beta, which isn’t a terrible effort considering the lack of profile Shootmania has compared to a League of Legends, Starcraft, DOTA 2 etc. Thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands, of beta keys have been released to the public, so there’s been plenty of time for some quality content to emerge.

Except it hasn’t. The maps, almost every single one, are awful. The one major advantage that Shootmania should be lauding over the competition, the ability for users to easily and quickly create levels of all shapes and sizes, remains nothing more than unfulfilled potential.

Despite a reported tens of thousands of custom levels, quality content just isn’t there and Nadeo’s effort isn’t good enough. Even the hardcore Shootmania players I’ve spoken to don’t rate the levels on offer. Almost every single map featured at least one fatal flaw, with problems including utterly absurd changes in elevation, excessively large maps and far too much useless, dead space.

But the biggest problem stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of movement. All advanced movement stems from your stamina, which lasts a couple of seconds and provides acceleration and the ability to bounce off walls. It can even act as a light counter-weight while mid-air, although it’s never enough to reverse your current trajectory.

Any foray into the air is akin to suicide. Jump pads are bad enough, but the lack of acceleration in the air makes it far too easy to predict where an opponent will land even from a basic jump. And that’s only a fraction of problems. Your ground speed is woeful. Jumping off a wall doesn’t give you enough acceleration. Stamina doesn’t last long enough and should regenerate on all surfaces. Rocket-jumping is out of the question, and circle-jumping, a critical tool for checking around corners and altering your pattern of movement, isn’t possible.

Shootmania is incredibly easy to learn as a result. There’s only three real keys to learn — left-click, right-click and WASD — and the basics of each mode are understood just as quickly. The only complication with the interface will be finding your sensitivity, a task not helped when Shootmania insists on resetting your controls upon loading or changing modes.

Beyond that, the game is perfectly stable and rather pleasing to the eye on higher settings. It’s a clean, functional presentation, although Nadeo won’t win awards for their groundbreaking textures or lighting. But players will appreciate the ability to clearly identify opponents even at long range, and low-end computers will have no troubles handling any situation Shootmania can cook up.

Sadly, Nadeo’s talent at scaling graphics runs inverse to their skill with netcode. Shootmania is hard enough considering the precision required. But any lag, even the smallest spike, ruins the experience: the game is literally unplayable without a decent ping. I tried several games on North American servers — following my miserable experience against Europeans in the beta — but it was a joyless lottery, aimlessly guessing how far ahead in time my opponent was.

Equally as frustrating, but completely unimportant in relation to the gameplay, is Maniaplanet’s design. Not only is it effectively worthless for people just getting into Shootmania, it’s also one of the ugliest things I’ve ever seen. Most of the fonts look completely out of place. A lot of the text isn’t even centered properly and everything has an amateurish appearance. This is the one area that hasn’t changed since the beta; it was rubbish then and it’s just as unpleasant now.

That aside, there’s a good amount of fun to be had with Shootmania provided everything’s lag-free. The free-for-all Royal mode is particularly good value for money. Players earn points for every kill and for the position in which they are eliminated. You can take two hits before dying and players gain extra points for capturing a pole in the centre, which triggers a cyclone that encapsulates the map. You only have one life per round, unless the pole isn’t captured, and each round lasts around one or two minutes.

Because Royal supports a wider range of players — instead of one-on-one duels or the 3v3 Elite mode, as many as 16 or more will be fighting it out in Royal — many of the problems with the maps become less jarring. There’s fewer dead zones and more open areas. Some even have small bunkers granting access to a slower, grenade-like projectile or a lightning gun for as long as you’re inside (although it offers no protection from the cyclone).

A few times the servers seemed to struggle with high numbers — more than 20 players, for example — but the frame rate never dropped even on high settings (I’m running an i5-3750K, 16gb RAM, GTX 660Ti and I’m running the game of a 480gb Corsair SSD, for reference).

The two most other popular modes were Elite and Joust, the former being the eSports-styled 3v3 mode shown at E3 last year. One team defends a flag for a fixed period while a single attacker, armed with a lightning gun, attempts to either capture or eliminate the defenders. Players earn points for successfully attacking and defending, with matches usually lasting between 15 minutes and half an hour.

Both modes are built more with eSports in mind, although tournaments will default to Elite. However, the basic Royal mode has a lot of potential and could be quite successful as a format for a one-day competition. Similar free-for-all events have been held within the Call of Duty community with great success, and Shootmania is almost purpose-built to take advantage of that.

But is that enough to warrant spending US$20? As a pure competitive outlet, no. There are competitions to play in, certainly, but the game lacks the buzz and groundswell of support a title needs to be a hit in eSports.

For fans of this old-school style of gameplay, that can be a tough pill to swallow. Many have a keen competitive streak, and have been waiting for a simple shooter relying on sharp aim and precise movement to replace the mantle Quake vacated.

Shootmania isn’t that game. If you’re simply looking for some good-natured fun then it could be the one for you, although there are still cheaper and more complete options. Quake Live isn’t as big as it used to be, but it’s also free-to-play, as is Warsow. They’re older, sure, but they’re just as fun too.

Good:

• Runs on low-end hardware
• Enemies easy to see even at extreme range
• Fast-paced action, particularly in a free-for-all
• Very accessible
• In-game streaming functionality
• Royal mode is excellent

Bad:

• Movement system needs a complete overhaul
• Maps are generally terrible
• Menu UI looks outdated (for the 90′s)
• Unplayable on foreign servers, and occasionally unplayable on local ones too
• Unlikely to be a major force in eSports, with neither a strong amount of buzz or a massive community already behind the game

You can pick up ShootMania: Storm for $20 on Steam. Product for this review supplied by Ubisoft.

A couple years ago, a developer called Trion Worlds, made up of a bunch of industry veterans with $100 million in investment capital from China, put out a fantasy MMO called RIFT. RIFT was actually really good. It had a wonderfully flexible class system, a highly fleshed-out world that emphasized exploration in interesting ways, and dynamic content in the form of, well, rifts.

This context is important, because despite the solid shooting action in Trion’s most recent title, Defiance has in large part forgone what made RIFT great.

Unlike RIFT‘s traditional MMO mechanics and fantasy world, Defiance is a third-person-shooter set in a post-apocalyptic, futuristic version of the Bay Area, a place I actually lived in for much of Defiance‘s development. Despite the faster-paced style of gameplay and the unique, real-world (kind of) setting, Defiance‘s true draw is the TV show tie-in, which Trion Worlds says will make mention of events in the game and vice versa.

Indeed, seeing the computer-generated version of Grant Bowler on “Episode” missions is pretty novel, though with the show yet to air as of publication, their characters hold no impact, and very little backstory is ever given to really make me care. The storylines in Defiance (the game) are generally very hokey across the board, in fact, and with Episode and Storyline missions running in tandem, it’s possible for the chronology of events to get screwy.

I did a series of quests for a character called Cooper, for example, and then in an Episode mission I was introduced to him for the first time. So if story is really important to you, maybe hold off on picking this up at least until the show starts to air.

On the other hand, if you want a pretty neat MMO shooter, you could do worse than Defiance. There is a reasonable variety of enemies, the AI — while not mind-blowing — will definitely challenge you at times, and there’s a surprising amount of content for a game with no subscription requirement. More impressive, though, is the range and variety of weapons.

There are your standard pistols, SMGs, shotguns, rocket launchers etc… which serve as overarching weapon classes, but within each of these, individual weapons can act completely differently. One shotgun might discharge two shells in quick succession before needing to be reloaded, while another might have fifteen rounds that have a great amount of scatter. A grenade-launcher might require you to manually detonate the grenades, or they might explode on contact, or they might bounce like crazy, or they might release a cloud of smaller grenades. Each new weapon feels like a new weapon, and that’s very impressive.

So it’s a shame that, outside of the shooting, Defiance feels quite shallow. There are racing side-missions that can feel kind of clumsy, but other than that, there’s nothing really driving you to explore this terraformed-version of Marin. There aren’t loads of little secrets littered across the land. There are a couple, and they even play BioShock-style audio when you find them, but they’re so few and far between that the world of Defiance often feels very empty between shootouts.

But if you don’t much care about things that don’t involve killing, there’s plenty. Lots of official missions are scattered across the world, and even just going to a ruined structure or a pulled-over truck is likely to pull you into a sort of mini-mission. It’s quite a lot like Guild Wars 2, in that stuff is always happening all over the place, and you can jump in and shoot some dudes or leave it be.

Defiance‘s one carry-over from RIFT, if you can really call it that, are the Arkfalls. They’re events that strike specific locations in the world and put a global marker on the map, encouraging you to check it out. Players tend to flock to these because, like RIFT‘s rifts, there are very good rewards available, and they often lead to neat global boss-encounters. When these massive player clusters happen, though, Defiance‘s servers sometimes struggle to keep up.

Luckily there is instanced group content too. Runs tend to be in the 15 minute range and have at least one boss encounter, with some loot at the end. The dynamic here is very similar to the solo-instances you tend to play through in the main story missions, except tuned for extra players. Player classes — which, like Borderlands, tend to revolve around a single ability — aren’t really taken into account.

There’s no tank/healer/damage dealer trinity, though you can sort of skill your character out to fill a specific role if you want. But beware — while RIFT let you switch roles on the fly virtually for free, changing your character in Defiance comes with a hefty currency cost.

Unfortunately, even during the best of Defiance‘s content, there are regular and very frustrating bugs. The client will crash for numerous reasons, characters will endlessly repeat dialogue, and if you tab-out of the game while driving, sometimes you’ll tab back in to see your car flying through the air impossibly. One of the most frustrating and regularly occurring bugs causes your character to be interrupted when doing almost any action a couple times a second, until you go to the menu.

That menu, and the entire user-interface, by the way, is clearly built with the console versions in mind. Buttons for equipping perks or destroying items are hidden down the bottom, there are nonsense radial menus, and chat is heavily de-emphasised. This is set to change soon, but for now it’s going to be frustrating for PC gamers to work through.

If the idea of a show and a game growing in tandem excites you, or you’re desperate for a new multiplayer shooter, it might be worth checking Defiance out. But maybe give it a couple weeks to find its feet and let the first episode or two of the show air first. Defiance has promise, but it needs a little more work.

Good:

• Quite a lot of content.
• Some of it is even sorta dynamic.
• No subscription required!
• A surprisingly large number of varied weapons.
• Plenty of emphasis on shooting bad dudes.

Bad:

• Little emphasis on stuff that doesn’t involve shooting or driving.
• More bugs in the game code than on the battlefield (and there are a LOT of bugs on the battlefield).
• The story will make you grimace.
• Definitely feels ill-suited to the keyboard/mouse setup at times.

Product for this review supplied by Trion Worlds.

As many of those who grew up in the era of the PlayStation do, I have distinct memories of the first Resident Evil, played at night, at a friend’s place, with the lights off. Moments like that are some of the best, and Resident Evil 6 desperately wants to emulate the series’ best moments — but ultimately what they’ve served up is brittle shell of nostalgia, with a core that is ultimately hollow.

From its opening levels, Resident Evil 6 evokes its predecessors explicitly. By the time Leon says, “It’s just like Raccoon City,” it’s crystal clear that the game is attempting to combine elements from many of the series’ games, across a substantial four separate campaigns. It’s got the action mechanics of the later games, a splash of the survival horror of the early games, and a fair few parts that seem to have been inspired by games outside the series along the way.

RE6 is, above all, the most Westernised game in the series, and that ought to make it the most palatable to action gamers’ tastes.

However, the problems start with the controls, which while a far cry from the deliberately tension-inducing awkwardness of the early games, are still somewhat clunky and less responsive than desirable. Characters turn and move sluggishly or inconsistently at times, shooting feels unreliable, and melee controls are either ineffective or devastatingly overpowered.

In fact, once you suplex a few zombies, it starts to seem like a waste of ammo to shoot them, even in the first campaign which is as close to the survival horror of Resident Evil 6’s forebears as the game ever gets. Things get worse in the second campaign focusing on Chris Redfield, which becomes a boring cover-shooter with hordes of enemies that shoot back, and where the sloppy combat mechanics fall apart. Then there’s the endless parade of cutscenes and QTEs throughout, as well as a few moments where you can be killed by a scripted event very easily if you don’t know it’s coming and get out of the way first.

There are definitely some setpieces that are impressive, and a puzzle section midway through the first campaign that’s a charming throwback, but like everything else in the game, it’s heartbreakingly linear. It doesn’t help that several sections are revisited in later campaigns, played from other characters’ perspectives. This is a great concept, but the execution makes it feel repetitive.

This is also a game that, even more than its immediate predecessor, Resident Evil 5, seems made for co-op. On the PC, you’re probably out of luck unless you can persuade friends to also get the PC version, and this is very much a console game. The same goes for the other multiplayer features. Like many of Capcom’s recent ports, it’s a competent one but still definitely a port, with minimal options. And you really do need a gamepad, though I have no problem with that, given the ubiquity of 360 controllers for PC gaming these days.

Resident Evil 6 is obviously a game with a big budget, but I can’t help feeling like it has no heart. It tries to be so many things, but there’s not one thing it tries that it really commits to. And it doesn’t really bring much new to the table either. The series’ best hope is probably still a reboot in the next console generation.

Good:

• Impressive visuals, the series’ best so far
• Some neat puzzles
• Extensive single-player campaigns

Bad:

• Soulless mish-mash of elements from other games
• Excessive QTEs
• Campaign is stretched out with several repeated sections

Resident Evil 6 is currently $40 on Steam. Product for this review supplied by Capcom.

A videogame’s hero is forever doomed to exuberant praise, but few ever recognise the tools that saw them through the darker, untold hours. We adorn the Dragonborn with titles, but never the Daedric Relics that protected him. We congratulate, Drake but not the firepower that saved him.  In recent times the bow has taken its place in the hands, and the boxarts, of the hunters and the hunted, and now the life and times of the humble skyhook and all of its age-old incarnations appear to be on the up and up, if you’ll pardon the pun.

In less than a month it has carried the hopes of two developers into varying degrees of expectations. One a BioShock hero; a million pairs of watching eyes; a million gasped breaths awaiting a perfect dismount, waiting for the deliverance of cloud-nine promises. The other, Sang Froid’s scruffy woodcutting heroes speeding on the Zipline from trap placement to trap placement, above the snow-drenched forests, into the unknown future of the indie developer.

In this way the Zipline is also the metaphorical hopes of a budding developer, even more so a small team with everything riding on their hero’s shoulders. Take a risk, grab on, and let the Zipline take you. You could soar!

Sang Froid is a game that asks you to put your faith in the tools of its heroes, utterly and completely, singing their praises as much as those of its axe-wielding lumberjack heroes who were responsible for their placement. The Zipline, in truth, is just one of these many tools — no less useful amongst a growing repertoire of bait, explosives and weight-triggered traps – all drip-fed over the length of Sang Froid’s campaign spanning the month of December 1858.

It’s in Sang Froid’s play phase — one part of a one-two punch of top-down trap deployment and third-person combat — where your ingenuity is thrown into stark contrast, highlighting just how genius that ingenious plan of yours was when it was scribbled notes on a piece of paper some thousand metres above. Did you account for the night’s breeze and its ability to carry your scent? Did the bait keep the werewolf masses at bay just long enough? Were those extra cents earned from skipping a bonfire worth it, now that you’re surrounded?

It’s tower defense meets third-person action in much the same way its Orc-riddled castle of a distant relation is, but in its offbeat setting of a legend-riddled 1858 Canada, and its unlikely heroes of two woodcutting brothers, Sang Froid’s tale of betrayal, jealousy and the Devil’s wiley ways carries an honesty that’s as endearing as its soundtrack is captivating. There is no wide-sweeping tale of a world in danger, just a town, a prophecy and a devil that dons a top hat among all manner of werewolves and their folk-tale brethren . Sang Froid is refreshing in its focus.

It’s a focus and a setting that permeates its play, on a genre that already felt stifled despite its limited attention. Governed by Action Points and a budget that deals in the overflowing wealth of dollars and cents, Sang Froid’s management phase is one of deciding between one of a million upgrades or items that would all help your efforts over the coming night. The defensible map, and the options at your disposal to defend it expand over time, equally praised and damned for their tantalising healing potions, better weapons and upgrades that would all be useful if only you could afford them.

Back to the zipline, and the fortunes of its carriage can sway wildly. Either the night goes ill and the zipline’s relaxed speed is cursed as much as the wolves below, or those well made plans are played out to perfection and the zipline ride is a relaxing change of pace while you await inevitable victory. Either way it’s the tools of its heroes that will remain Sang Froid’s highlight – a refreshing reflection on an overlooked setting brought to life for the strategic at heart.

There are systems at play here that never truly find the time of day — or night, as the case may be — to fully stretch their legs, closing out just as you finally have access to the intoxicating repertoire, but there’s enough gold in these here strategy hills (and enough heart)  to warrant the praise, grant this team another shot, and allow a possible series or second instalment the ability to soar.

Good:

• An earthy, honest representation of a time-period – and setting – that only ever enhances Sang Froid’s charm.
• New systems — such as scent, threat and rage — play to that hardcore, survivalist itch while taking full advantage of the setting.
• I’d sit in the main menu all day just to listen to that soundtrack
• While lacking a New Game+ or other modes, going back and challenging yourself to complete missions with fewer traps offers greater challenge.
• Punishing in the “Aha! moment” kind of way.

Bad:

• Closes out just as you’re given big enough scenarios to stretch the game’s strategic legs.
• Some of Sang Froid’s  mechanics can shout over each other at times, lost in the busy-work.

Sang Froid is available on Steam for $15. Product for this review purchased by the author at their own expense.

I have never really understood why your average consumer would buy a separate modem and router. The vast majority of connected households in Australia make use of ADSL connections, and thus don’t need specialised hardware to be able to physically connect to their gateway. In my experience, consumer-grade modem/routers do not lack for features or connectivity options.

Sure, many of them are fairly rudimentary in their offerings, but once they’re set up they don’t really require much maintenance, right? You just leave them there doing their thing. I mean, sure, you do need to reboot them when your connection drops out. Also I guess it can be annoying to have to log in to add or remove devices from your mac address filter using a half-baked interface.

It would be super handy if I could do that from my phone or tablet without having to go over to a computer, and without having to use my stupid fat fingers to peck away at an administration panel that was only designed for use with a mouse and keyboard. Not to mention the fact that the esoteric language used to describe the features and settings of such devices makes it all-but impossible for my less tech-savvy family members to administer them unassisted. Gosh it would be nice if I could attach USB storage to my router and have it made available to the entire network.

Okay, fine. As it turns out, the major advantage in purchasing a separate router is that, well, I can do all these things. Much more attention seems to be paid to the features and usability of a specialised device. The month that I have spent with the Western Digital My Net N900 has been very positive, and has led to a concession that perhaps it really is worth considering the extra expense of a good quality router.

The N900 has features for days but usability is really important when it comes to home networking, so let’s focus on the user interface. One of the most impressive features of the N900 is it’s ability to guide the user through the process of setting it up, and notifying them of optional and necessary actions that they could take to improve their experience with the device — check out some of the screens below (click to enlarge).

Basic connectivity settings are covered by simple wizards, and supported by detailed but accessible help popups. Even if the user doesn’t understand the specifics of what is being described, there is generally enough information for them to be able to make an informed decision. The admin panel also makes use of a notifications system to alert the user to tasks that require their input, which removes a lot of the guesswork that tends to pervade amateur networking.

Physically, the N900 is solidly built and fairly unassuming. It isn’t going to win any awards for industrial design, but looks aren’t really much of a consideration when it comes to networking gear. The rear panel sports four gigabit ethernet ports, one WAN port for connecting to your modem, and a USB port that can be used to connect and share USB printers or storage. Wireless coverage was on-par with my experience with other 802.11g/n access points, and can be easily extended. During my time with the device, it did not require a single reboot. My connectivity has been solid throughout, but it is worth noting that a month isn’t a huge amount of time.

It’s difficult to fault the Western Digital My Net N900, a solid option for those hoping for something more useable than what is generally on offer from consumer-grade modem/routers.

Good:

• Lots and lots of juicy features
• Highly usable, even for the uninitiated
• Easily expandable
• Seemingly robust connectivity
• Simple and effective QoS

Bad:

• Purchasing a separate modem and router will cost more than buying a dual device
• Looks and feels a little plasticky

The Western Digital My Net N900 retails for around $250 at most stockists. Product for this review was supplied by Western Digital.

There’s very little to say about BioShock Infinite that you haven’t already heard — other than “well, how does it actually play then?” After spending the last few days with the game, we’re ready with our thoughts in this video review below. Take a look.

You can download this review in HD from our file library, or stream it below. A YouTube mirror is also available.

Good:

• Staggeringly well-realised world, full of life and detail
• An engaging storyline with a genuinely compelling ending and a great cast of characters
• Finally, an AI companion that doesn’t make you want to track down and murder the developers
• Meaty, satisfying combat with plenty of tactical options
• Skyhook and skylines make for awesomely dynamic movement, especially during combat
• Superlative PC support with impressive range of options
• No awful boss battles

Bad:

• Enemy AI seems occasionally reluctant to engage
• 10 – 15 hours is too short a time to spend in Columbia

You can buy a Steam key for BioShock Infinite for a tidy $52 through our partners at Green Man Gaming. Product for this review supplied by 2K Games.

It feels weird reviewing a game that’s already been released to almost universal acclaim on the Xbox Live Arcade store — but this is a PC-gaming site, and so there’s a chance you guys may never have heard of this madness. That is simply unacceptable.

Made by the devious Red Lynx team (now a Ubisoft studio), the last time PC gamers sampled their work was with Trials 2: Second Edition in 2008 (which has been remastered and included in this release). In fact, let’s put the kickstand down for a moment: head off and install it on Steam if you own it. Go on, it’s only 135Mb. Fun game, isn’t it! Yes, it’s a shame it looks like arse (even by the standards of the time).

Trials Evolution: Gold on the other hand, weighs in at 3.17 GB on Steam (or Uplay) — that’s quite the difference in storage space and while of course the nature of modern graphics explains the huge increase, I like to think that there’s more than a little magic mixed in.

Describing the physical nature of Trials shouldn’t really be necessary even for PC gamers — it’s a puzzle-game where you need to navigate each track section under a set time with under a set number of faults to earn medals which then unlock new tracks to race on. The physics of it are simple; pitching forward, leaning backwards and careful throttle management are the underpinnings of the gameplay, but it’s in the navigating that the core experience really starts.

What is very necessary to impart here is the excruciating joy that comes of landing a gold-medal time after not just retrying the track 10 times, but retrying a single tricky-section upwards of 50 times. It’s not just bloody-mindedness that drives you to such extremes either, nor is it the joy of finally nailing it (although that feels pretty damned good); the allure is that you can see the rhythm of the section you’re trying to beat… if I pitch forward just there while accelerating like this, and then use that speed to bounce my back wheel just so… and articulating those ideas through your control inputs will have you coming back to Trials for a long time to come.

Helping you stay the course through the enjoyably torturous grind are the gorgeous arenas; moonlit ruins, ancient cities, flooded valleys and war-torn beaches are among the many beautifully presented environments you’ll tear up with your varied assortment of motorcycles (which, as a proper trials-bike-riding friend stated quite indignantly, “..aren’t trials bikes at all”). The backgrounds aren’t as actively animated as other examples of 2D/3D games (except perhaps the appropriately named ‘Mindbender’ level) but as you’ll see when we get to the track editor, the basic tracks on offer are potentially a very small part of Trials’ value.

Rounding out the package are special stages where you’ll ski, fly, operate UFO’s, balance steel balls on your head and more. The revamped ‘HD Warehouse’, new levels, multiplayer and special challenges alone are enough core gameplay to thoroughly justify the $24.95 pre-order asking price, but thanks to the included editor, there is an impressive longevity to this title that hopefully means more money for the developer, as new players are attracted through user-made content rather than milking existing players through DLC.

I have a few gripes with Trials and I mention them only in passing, as none really detract from the quality of the game. Your bike rider is quite an ugly little sprite and it’s a shame that the attention lavished on the environment didn’t include him (not a ‘her’, oddly). You’ll earn dollars through the course of the game that can be spent on fancy new outfits and hats, but this felt unnecessary given that I never felt connected to my rider — the tracks are the star of the show, although I would have liked the option to change my bike’s appearance in some way.

There were some points where my PC would stutter through maybe 10 seconds worth of frames and this happened intermittently across a few different levels (primarily on levels that utilised a lot of shadow and lighting effects) but this wasn’t enough to affect a run. With that hiccup aside, it ran beautifully and, while I found the keyboard worked fine, my best runs came through using a controller.

Trials is one of those glorious games that ships with the very editor that the developers used to make the game. Now, like TrackMania and Little Big Planet before it, you can create your own mind-boggling creations that can easily be uploaded for others to share and vote on. Or, more likely, you’ll enjoy the fruits of others’ hard labour — as the ‘pro’ track editor is exhaustively comprehensive.

With the ability to manipulate the game in some fairly incredible ways, it has the same flexibility of some of LBP’s crazier mods: just check out this ridiculously detailed level of Skyrim’s Riften to know what I’m talking about. Unconvinced? How about a speeder-run across Endor, or this weird Scramble-inspired piece. Wait, one last one! Smokin’ jehosephat!

I haven’t touched on multiplayer for two reasons. Firstly, I prefer a singleplayer experience and approached the game largely from that angle, but mainly I found it really difficult to get a match going due to what I’m hoping was the fact the game is not yet released. Hopefully this really is the issue, as at some points when uploading my end of round score it was quicker to select ‘go offline’ so I could progress rather than wait — this may be to do with Ubisoft’s servers again not being fully functional before release however, a theory further reinforced by the fact that the nifty inbuilt Youtube up-loader worked flawlessly. This might be a good time to note that Trials is available both from UPlay and from Steam, but requires the Uplay service to launch the game.

Multiplayer itself will pit you against up to three other players racing side by side and while the commotion can take your eyes off your rider making landings infuriatingly difficult at times, it’s a fun distraction and gets quite intense as you find a run that puts you slightly in the lead (or disastrously behind). I expect this will be a major drawcard for those who want to race with friends, but it doesn’t appear to have the longevity of simply trying out other people’s creations.

Wow, you really read this far? Okay, here’s the bottom line: Trials Evolution: Gold is superb. Go buy it now.

Wait, sorry, one more.

Product for this review supplied by Ubisoft.

StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm is a huge beast, and that’s why we decided to pair up and take it on from all angles. In this single-player video review, we explore where Heart of the Swarm fits in the overall storyline, what Kerrigan gets up to when left to her own devices, and whether or not there’s enough of a storyline there to justify a full expansion.

If you’re after more information on the multiplayer side of things, read our massive in-depth review by our resident Grandmaster League-player, Alex.

You can download the video below from our file library, or a YouTube mirror is also available if you’d prefer to watch it there.

Good:

• Still the best RTS gameplay in its class, by a long shot
• Typical Blizzard polish and attention to detail
• Huge variety of missions showcases an impressively powerful engine
• Great cinematics
• Being able to mutate and choose between breeds is excellent
• The return of some old Brood War favourites (Hell yeah, Lurkers)

Bad:

• Takes literally 20 missions for the story to begin
• Dialogue is occasionally Red Alert level of cheesey
• Some missions are clearly just padding
• Feels somewhat unnecessary in the overall storyline

Product for this review supplied by Blizzard.

Looking for a review of the single-player campaign? Click here for our video review.

Perhaps the most telling observation one can make about Heart of the Swarm is that, despite it being their expansion, Zerg players are the least happy about the changes.

They’re not despondent; they’re just not cheering from the aisles. It’s particularly noticeable in Australia, whose competitive scene has been characterised with an unhealthy degree of Zerg commanders for the last two years. Most of our tournaments were strictly all-Zerg affairs: Jared “PiG” Krensel, for instance, won the Australian leg of the Blizzard World Championship Series purely thanks to his prowess in the Zerg vs Zerg mirror.

Changing the status quo, obviously, can only be a good thing. But it’s not as if the race is at a distinct disadvantage across the board, as Andrew “mOOnGlaDe” Pender showcased at the HotS launch in Federation Square. It’s just that the collective’s knowledge has effectively been reset.

Consider Wings of Liberty. A Zerg player hasn’t seen much from his Protoss opponent beyond the usual forge/expansion play, so he wants to play safely. They know that at around 7 minutes and 30 seconds, they need to build a spore crawler. There’s no guarantee that Dark Templars are on the way, but if they build one now, they know they’ll be safe.

This sort of general understanding of how the races and units interact with each other after the last three years — and more importantly, what interactions are possible and at what times — has become so vast that reactions like these are common even among the lower leagues. (There are obviously more exact examples — overlord scout timings, times to scan as a Terran and so on — but this is just for illustrative purposes.)

It’s particularly crucial for Zerg, which is a reactive race by nature. That’s why the professional Zergs I’ve spoken to are so concerned about the next six months. The chasm of the unknown is incredibly unnerving after enjoying two straight years of knowing every possible counter.

Right now, that comprehensive database of timings and responses, despite the lengthy beta test, does not currently exist. Players of all races are now re-feeling their way through the new units and the new maps. Many will be happy to recycle strategies from Wings of Liberty, play it safe for a week or so and see what changes Blizzard decides to implement.

But one thing is certain: one year from now, the state of Heart of the Swarm will be substantially different from the Heart of the Swarm you see today. This is the essence of StarCraft: change.

If you’re not prepared for that, if you can’t accept or are too flustered to cope with the wildly changing circumstances of the various matchups, Heart of the Swarm is not the game for you. In fact, I’d wager that real-time strategy probably isn’t your genre. Stability, in terms of how players approach the game, has never been par for the course.

This is what playing StarCraft is truly about: throwing yourself into the unknown, over and over again.

A finer analysis

On a more practical level, players are going to play safe, which means a lot of very non-greedy, gas-intensive, delayed expansion builds. This obviously isn’t the case for Zerg; but it’s going to take quite some time until you see Terrans happily expanding off a single Barracks in the first few minutes, for instance.

It’s a necessity, really, considering that most of the new units have an immediate effect within the first five minutes. The widow mine’s zoning ability can be rather handy in delaying marine/zergling-based attacks. The Mothership Core is a great defensive unit of its own, making fast expansions much more versatile in the Protoss mirror match.

Probably the change with the most potential is the new recall ability for Protoss, which could transform matches against Zerg from the current WarCraft 3-esque major-battle centric style to something a little more decentralised, similar to the multi-pronged high intensity battles you see whenever good Terrans and Zergs face off.

And yet the old styles of going for a huge deathball, with or without the power of the Tempest/Oracle/Mothership Core, is still completely viable. But it’s also more vulnerable than ever before too. Terran’s range has been substantially upgraded: Siege Tanks are more readily available with the siege mode upgrade no longer a requirement, while Thors no longer get instantly negated by High Templars.

There isn’t a single match-up where a use can’t be found for every unit. Even Ravens have more utility, although it took at least two years before players could find any role for them at all (beyond building one or two for detection).

Stepping into the swarm

You’ll find most of the best changes have been made outside of the game itself, with the interface and menu system receiving a huge overhaul in the last few months.

The ability to resume from replays will be the lifeblood for tournaments plagued by internet connectivity issues. It works relatively smoothly and will in itself become a massive boon for players looking to practice their late-game. Alternatively, you could get a friend and play out certain battles from major tournament matches to practice your mechanics (or perhaps even find a better way to engage).

Global Play will save professional teams a tonne of money, since multiple accounts are no longer required to access different servers. That makes it a little cheaper for professional teams or hardcore players looking to test their mettle in the shark-infested waters of the Korean server.

The opening interface itself is far more functional too. There’s more news, it’s more relevant and more broader in its scope. Patch notes are easily accessible through an in-game link; tournaments now get direct coverage through the opening menu.

Players get far more information through the post-game menu. The build order tab hasn’t changed, although it’s a lot slicker and much cleaner than before. A new tab called Performance gives you an outline of your average performance against the game you just played.

The profile page now has statistics built in for each match-up and race, which is a great boon for newer players looking to analyse their flaws. It’s easy to read and use and is good if you can’t get your head around SC2gears (although the third-party program is still far more comprehensive than Blizzard’s additions).

Still, it’s a step in the right direction for a game as heavily focused on competitive play. There’s even a new Reviews system, akin to something you’d see in DOTA 2 or League of Legends. And the much broader challenge mode, while not as comprehensive as some build-order tutorials you might find on Youtube, provides sufficient instruction for newer players to ease them into ladder matches.

All-rounder of the year

Heart of the Swarm has greatly improved the social facilities as well. Wings of Liberty didn’t even have chat channels or clan support upon launch; those oversights have been rectified. The Arcade section better caters towards the mapmaking community with a better framework for newer maps, instead of the previous system that made it difficult to find anything but the most popular.

It’s a much-needed evolution, given that the strength of the StarCraft and WarCraft 3 communities was their exceptionally deep roster of custom games, the eternally-popular Defence of the Ancients being a shining example.

In just a few seconds, I came across a turn-based card game. Then there’s the Starcraft Universe single-player MMO. There’s even a map that showcases every unit and explosion over the course of a minute, which caches all the assets and improves in-game performance provided you run it once every time you open the game.

SC2’s editor is a powerful, powerful beast, and the capacity for mapmakers to create even more amazing games has just increased exponentially.

Two-thirds of the way there

With Heart of the Swarm’s release, StarCraft 2 is, at least commercially,  two-thirds complete. But what direction does the series go from here?

Further upgrades to the back-end, editor and the interface seem the most likely path. A more comprehensive multiplayer tutorial for each of the three races wouldn’t hurt either; while the challenge mode and the campaigns ease you into the mechanics, something to teach players basic build orders would be a clever addition.

The new units in Heart of the Swarm make sense because they filled roles that the races lacked in Wings of Liberty. Terrans needed a better solution to the Infestor/Brood Lord combo that didn’t break the Zerg/Protoss match-up. Protoss needed a way to safely expand against Zerg that wouldn’t ruin games against Terrans, where fast expansions were already common.

So what holes are currently missing in the overall armory? The only immediate one I can see is perhaps a way for Protoss to become much more mobile than before against Zerg, giving them the tools to completely decentralise the match-up away from the deathball-style that has become so prevalent over the last few years.

The inclusions of the Tempest have made late game a much more interesting proposition for Protoss users, but it doesn’t mean massing a huge army isn’t still a safer and more viable plan than multi-pronged attacks.

Conversely, will huge waves of mine-fields bog down the Terran vs Zerg match-up? The most recent Major League Gaming tournament has shown indications that this kind of zonal play will become more popular in the future, particularly when players get a better handle on the exact positioning of the mines.

It’s a new, strange world. Nobody knows exactly where we’ll end up 12 months from now. But there is one thing I can guarantee: if you buy into Heart of the Swarm, you’ll still have a perfectly functional, complex and fascinating game with a vibrant community in a year.

You can’t say that about very many games in this day and age.

Good:

• Brand new menu UI injects life into Battle.net 2.0
• Blizzard’s attentive eye for balance means the game will remain in a highly playable state for years
• StarCraft 2 editor is probably a great way to break into the gaming industry, and it just got more powerful
• No more “WE WANT LAN” when you can resume from a replay
• Global Play lets one account play on every server
• Clan support!
• Unranked play makes the game less intimidating for lower leagues and lets more advanced players dabble with the other races without ruining their record
• Coverage of community news in-game has been expanded substantially

Bad:

• No in-game browser to watch forums or streams, although this is less a downside than it is a luxury

Product for this review supplied by Blizzard.

Say what you like about EA’s emergent monetisation of the Battlefield series (actually please don’t, I hate it when you fight), it’s hard to direct the same vitriol at DICE. They have been supporting this bad-boy like demons with some excellent DLC, and although that goes some way to justifying EA’s whole Premium deal, so far it’s been mostly worth it.

Back to Karkand was good for retro thrillage, personal fave Close Quarters ruffled a few feathers with its CoD methodology (but look at all the things that explode), Armored Kill made the rivetheads that much happier, and Aftermath’s environments went full retard. Sounds like there are no more bases left to cover, but End Game finalises the quintet of extra bits with something mostly alien to Battlefield’s considered advance: speed.

Your embrace of End Game will largely depend on just how much you like burning around on dirt bikes and chucking sick wheelies. Its four seasonal maps feel primarily built around the belated appearance of Capture the Flag, which means crossing vast distances from your base to theirs and trying to come back again with the goods. The only way to consistently do this is by way of all those frequently respawning bikes, and you’ll have to learn to love ‘em if you don’t already or quit the cigs and go jogging. The latter is not fun, especially when you clock a few K’s and a sniper pegs you with his crappy silenced pistol at your destination.

Luckily two guys can perch on one bike, and while they scream along at a solid pace and can pop the front wheel up to get extra air off angles (and curious ramps), they don’t respond well to a few bullets. It can start to make some maps a little predictable, particularly on the more linear A-to-B affairs like Operation Riverside: Everyone’s Engineers mine up the main roads, so you take your bikes off the beaten track where the opposition is invariably waiting for you. Doesn’t take long to learn the best places to stake out, either.

That aside, CTF itself is one of the biggest highlights here, and if nothing else End Game is an even mightier throwback than Back to Karkand because of it. It’s a reminder that one of the earliest FPS multiplayer modes arguably remains its best, with neither the cut ‘n thrust intricacies of Rush nor Conquest’s tidal ebb and flow anywhere near as artful as: YOU HAVE THE FLAG. It’s genuinely thrilling stuff. It’s a long way back to base and even when you get there, if your own flag is missing, you have to dodge probable death until someone retrieves it before scoring.

Epic great escapes ensue: Moments after hooning into the enemy’s base and ditching your bike in the face of one too many RPGs, you make a mad scramble for the flag. You get it, but your bike is a smoking wreck and they’re coming for you. BAM: Some guy power-slides right up next to you, honks in a comical way, and you jump on, speeding away through the smoke and debris and near-misses of rockets. At its best, there is nothing else like it. If End Game boasted the same “HD” destruction seen in the likes of Close Combat (why doesn’t it?), it would go from “This is insane” to “Who needs employment?”

If it wasn’t for Air Superiority, this whole deal would unquestionably rule BF3’s DLC roost by leagues. You don’t have to play this sky-centric variant, but in your online journeys you’ll undoubtedly get stuck in a few games of it. Some peeps love BF3’s jets, but they’re a minority if the lacklustre efforts on display here are to be believed. It can be really tedious, and immediately favours anyone who’s managed to rank up their jet with badass accoutrements. You spawn in a flyer and can’t eject, so no creative maneuvers like this classic. You just sort of have to fly around dying until your drunk housemate trips over your power cord. It actually ends up being kind of funny, with people doing all kinds of stupid stuff in the air to amuse themselves. It doesn’t speak that well of the mode itself though, and for those looking to take it seriously, there will always be a tobosaurus nuzzling your exhaust with the nose of his F/A-18 Super Horny.

If you can avoid ever having to attend Top Gun, End Game is a must. Happily spend your money. Parachuting out over the snowy wastes of Sabalan Pipeline from a mile-high dropship dutifully requisitioned by the taking of C is a buzz and a half.

Good:

• CTF on motorbikes is a great addition
• New maps offer great opportunities to catch sick air

Bad:

• Some maps are a little predictable
• Air Superiority needs rebalancing and shouldn’t be played seriously

Product for this review supplied by the author at their own expense.