Zeno Clash 2 was one of the surprise announcements of last E3. Amidst all the ‘hey I can do Uncharted as well!’ games, it was nice to see this little brawler making a return in all its oddly faced, pugilistic glory.

It’s doubly nice too to announce that Zeno Clash 2 doesn’t just build upon the first game’s promise, it flies off to lala land on the back of a bird with a face like Rasputin, or something. Basically it’s great.

Zeno Clash follows straight on from the story of the first one, with the Golem that Ghat liberated taking control of Haldestom, imprisoning Ghat’s enemy FatherMother at the same time.

If that makes no sense to you, it’s your fault for not playing the first Zeno Clash you turkey, as the sequel makes no bones about referencing events in its predecessor.

Anyway, Ghat decides he doesn’t like Golem after all and is convinced by his wild haired sister to free FatherMother in order to fight back against the Golem’s regime.

Once again Ghat finds himself on the warpath through the land of Zenozoik, beating up absolutely everyone he meets on the way.

It’s a simple tale, but sometimes simplicity is absolutely fine, otherwise you end up with a garbled mess of set pieces that leave you feeling increasingly disconnected from the action with every moment. Hello Crysis 3.

The World Of Zeno Clash 2

Zeno Clash 2 is a much bigger game than the original, although it’s not quite as open world as you’d have been led to believe, as you’re still confined to certain areas while you go roaming.

You can however, go back and forth whenever you want in order to go looking for trinkets, moths (an NPC you can do sidequests for is obsessed with moths) and posts in the ground that let you level up, though why they just didn’t let you level up in game through progressing and beating others is anyone’s guess.

It does however force you to go off the beaten path sometimes and drink in the sights, which is a good thing too, as even by its predecessor’s standard Zeno Clash 2 is beautiful, and the quirky, moody soundtrack emphasises how perversely picturesque it all is.

Any iffy textures or bits of naff animation are overwhelmed by just how sumptuous looking and stylish the world of Zenozoik appears. It’ll have you pressing the screenshot button more than Dear Esther, with the added bonus that you can punch people.

The punching by the way is still excellent, and is easily the best since vagrant bashing simulator Condemned 2. It naffs about sometimes with targeting, but when it works, it works fantastically, plenty of oomph being delivered with each swinging fist that connects.

Also, because deep down Ace Team knows that everyone likes professional wrestling, whether they want to admit it or not, they’ve stuck in a piledriver as a finishing move that’s satisfying and hilarious.

It’s the best implementation of a wrestling move since Leon could decapitate monks with suplexes in Resident Evil 4.

Is Zeno Clash 2 For You?

Zeno Clash 2 will obviously not be for everyone, and its low budget does show through.

However given its price, and the fact there’s a full length campaign this time (as well as a fun co-op mode) it deserves more attention and love than it currently seems to be getting, and feels more competent and fully featured than a few AAA titles.

It’s also another tantalising glimpse into one of the most unique game worlds crafted in what seems like an age, one that’s absolutely screaming to be opened up for some proper open world exploration in any future game.

Given time and a heftier budget, there’s no reason to doubt that Ace Team could make the fundamental stuff work in a proper open world setting, full of sidequests and odd characters to converse with. As long as they keep the piledriver.

Call Of Duty is a bastard, and if you have even a slight fondness thinking about classic Unreal or Quake then you’ll likely feel the same.

Twitch shooters are no more, the closest equivalent now filled with perks, killstreaks, KDR obsessives and far too many whiny school kids that shouldn’t even be playing it.

So if you do recall hard-won battles in Quake or rocket jumps in Unreal Tournament then you should also consider ShootMania Storm: the twitch shooter is back.

There’s a finely-honed simplicity to ShootMania Storm’s gameplay. Though the maps may change, the underlying mechanics tying all together couldn’t be much simpler.

Left-click to shoot, space to jump. That’s practically it.

As any fan of twitch shooters will know, winning isn’t about who shoots first (a la Call Of Duty) and nor is the victor the one who claims an advantage (a la Battlefield).

The winner of a ShootMania Storm one on one is the player who is most in tune with their prescience, that uncanny ability to predict an opposing player’s movement even before they’ve moved.

And in that sense ShootMania Storm is one of the most intense, most involving, most dramatic multiplayer shooters of recent times.

The Simplicity Of ShootMania

Part of this is the bespoke mode titled Storm. This is your starting point for ShootMania, the equivalent to Call Of Duty’s Team Deathmatch.

It’s fairly original too, well as far as multiplayer shooters go. The match begins with up to 16 players in a free-for-all as they barrel towards the centre of the map.

Here is a single beacon, the objective being to reach it first, claim it as your own and score a handful of extra points as a one-time reward.

Of course everyone aims to do the same, resulting in a fairly mad dash into the centre and an equally frenetic battle once you’re there.

After being captured, the beacon is practically useless. However, with its point reward claimed the beacon then summons the ‘OffZone’, a tornado whose eye becomes increasingly narrow until the remaining players are huddled around the beacon with nowhere else to run.

Trapped here with your back against the wall (or tornado, even), you’re forced into a standoff of sorts as you and any remaining players duke it out for victory.

You’ll resort to single-steps, carefully-timed jumps and that feeling in the pit of your stomach that tells you your next shot is the most important moment of your life.

That’s ShootMania Storm, and it’s brilliant.

The Glory Days Of Unreal And Quake

It’s clear that Nadeo has spent a long time properly balancing ShootMania Storm, even if its simplicity does belie the obvious depth here.

Though there are three main weapons to choose from, your primary tool will be a sort of quick-burst pulse. Reminiscent of rocket launchers in Unreal Tournament, the trick is pre-empting movement.

You don’t have health, however, but a number of ‘shields’. At most you’ll have three, and get tagged this amount of times and you’re out. 

With Storm you’ll respawn as long as the OffZone isn’t active, while in others it’s a brief countdown before your back in the game.

As you improve your shield count decreases; play well and you’ll be reduced to one-shot kills and that’s when ShootMania becomes really tense.

The tricky part is figuring out which enemies have extra shields and which don’t. The game moves so quick you won’t always witness a connecting shot, so you’re reliant on the point marker indicating a striking shot to inform you of your success.

As such, it can be a pain to quickly get vanquished by a player you had presumed dead.

Other weapons include a slow, proximity mine style cannon and an instant-shot Railgun equivalent. These are only active once you’re on certain panels though, and it can be jarring when switching so quickly.

Speed And Precision In ShootMania

Where multiplayer in most twitch shooters is heavily-focused on power control – namely ensuring you have access to a health boost or special weapon before anyone else – ShootMania Storm doesn’t.

In many ways its barebones and, in that simplicity, it might be a little off-putting to those who still play Quake and Unreal Tournament.

But it just means there’s nothing to confuse. You win or you die based on skill, and not on a player’s ability to mark particular zones.

With that said, bunny hopping is an equally important tactic in these games, and it’s here where ShootMania Storm muddies the water a little.

While different panels can switch weapons, they can also switch your abilities. Specified strips of terrain will turn to sprint mode: here the space button will cause your character to increase in speed rather than jump.

Momentum is a considerable part of ShootMania Storm and figuring out not only how to increase your speed but how to maintain it will prove the distinguishing feature between the different levels of players.

But well-timed jumps is just as important, and it can be hugely annoying when – in the midst of a strafing battle with an enemy – your jump button suddenly doesn’t work.

ShootMania's Different Maps And Modes

The addition of these strips are great and well suited to the fast-paced game that ShootMania Storm is, but using it to turn off the jump button that is ever so important to these games seems like a backwards-step.

Inevitably you’ll learn the maps and know when and where to counteract this issue, but that in itself is a problem. You shouldn’t have to.

Speaking of maps, it’s probably worth noting that ShootMania’s collection of pre-made maps aren’t anything to get excited about. Storm Mode in particular suffers of very similar maps, though a handful do seem keenly built for high-level playing.

It’s in the other modes where the map design proves a little more interesting. Battle Mode is a Capture The Base type set up, with teams taking it in turns to overrun a set of beacons that need to be captured.

It’s a brilliant mode and an entertaining shift from Storm, but the maps are open to a little more variety than Storm – which as a mode is entirely dependant on the centre of a map.

That’s where custom maps come in. As with TrackMania, the map creation tools of ShootMania are in equal parts simple and confusing.

Crafting a perfect, battle ready map will take a long while of tweaking, testing and tweaking again. But it’s still just tile-based.

For the sake of making its map creation tools accessible, Nadeo has once again resorted to using a series of tiles to build its map. It’s awkwardly inflexible as a result, meaning a lot of the maps you create will end up similar without you even intending to.

Map Creation In ShootMania

This is where the community comes in and though it has been proven with TrackMania it’s hard to really ascertain with ShootMania.

Of the user-made maps we played many of them were enjoyable, well put together and designed to an eSports level of consideration.

But watching these games through the eyes of our allies (after invariably getting disintegrated) it was clear that this form of map creation meant that almost always there will be an exploit somewhere.

Time will tell whether ShootMania’s map creation tools will prove as popular as TrackMania, but we certainly hope so – Nadeo’s pre-made maps don’t offer quite enough variety to return to over and over again.

It’s unlikely that ShootMania Storm will appeal to everyone. The audience surrounding dedicated twitch shooters has long since waned, and that’s a shame because it means many will miss out on some epic multiplayer moments here.

What is interesting is that this likely isn’t the final product, either. Even during our review ShootMania Storm was updated to include a new mode, a new weapon and new tilesets for creation.

At it’s core this is reminiscent of the glory days of skill-based shooters, and we urge anyone who thinks themselves a dab hand at Call Of Duty to pit themselves against the best in ShootMania Storm. You will get decimated.

The twitch shooter is back, and it's time you got involved.

Version tested: PC

MMOs are always tricky to review. On one hand it’s necessary to criticise the flaws, but on the other any one of those issues could be patched out a week later. Finding that balance is important.

Luckily Defiance isn’t quite as complex as most MMOs. Yes, there are problems, some inherent with its design and others easily fixed and patched out. 

But as a shooter first and an MMO second, concerns over Defiance's simplicity aren't such a problem. Defiance is at its best when you have a gun and an enemy to point it at.

What that gun is comes down to you, but rather than worry too much about stats and numbers, Defiance dumbs down the RPG elements in favour of something more Borderlands-esque.

And the Borderlands references won’t stop there, either.

You’ll pick a class, you’ll level up and you unlock additional improvements - faster shield recharges, improved crit damage, that sort of stuff. It’s great to be given the option to improve, of course, but it all plays second fiddle to just existing in the world. And shooting things.

The World Of Defiance

Defiance is set on Earth after a battle left it scarred, abandoned and the majority of its survivors mutated. Think Fallout without the depth, Half-Life 2 without the subtlety.

You’re an Ark Hunter, a player character injected with fancy do-hickies that imbues him or her with stealth, speed, strength or the ability to create a decoy. Sounds simple enough? It is.

After picking your choice you’re left to your own devices. Where most MMOs direct you around a fairly particular route, Defiance feels a little more open than that.

The main missions will obviously guide you through the world at its own pace, but the environment is littered with a checklist of things to do whenever you feel like it.

You can only accept one quest at a time and though that might feel at odds with the typical MMO accept-‘em-all, complete-‘em-all, hand-‘em-all-in method it actually works quite well.

This is thanks to the directionless nature of Defiance, which sounds like a negative but is actually a compliment. Like some of the best single-player open world games, you’re free to pick and choose what you do and when.

There are enough quests in your vicinity at any one time that you’ll never be stuck for something to do.

Questing In Defiance

The quests themselves are fairly throwaway in their nature: collect data pads, access control panels, defend areas and the like. But that’s not such a problem, much like Borderlands the quests are little more than pointing you in the direction of somewhere to go to shoot things.

It really is as simple as that.

There’s a little more variety in the form of leaderboard quests, whether it’s time trial races or hotshot challenges that pit you against waves of enemies. They don’t mix up the gameplay too much, but add a couple of extras knobs on top of the main and side missions.

But don’t worry if you’re used to waiting for enemies to spawn in most MMOs, Defiance has cleverly blended grouping so you never have to worry too much about intruding on another player’s session.

Any quests being completed in the same area are automatically shared with any participating players, which means you needn’t worry too much about racing to pick up an item before any other Ark Hunters or get the killing blow on a particular enemy.

It’s a smart system, especially since interaction is rare in Defiance. As you follow a chain of quest objectives you’ll likely do so as an ad hoc group, silently jetting from point to point simply because your goals align.

And yet you’re not tied down. If you suddenly decide you no longer want to ride ATVs with the rest of your impromptu allies then you can – no need to leave a group, share loot or even say goodbye.

Raids, Groups And Loot

World events can appear from time to time, too, and are basically the equivalent of open world raids. As you arrive you’ll face a specific challenge of some kind.

Alone this would take a good hour of idle gunfire to finally succeed, but the beacon invariably summons numerous Ark Hunters to join you. As such one typical event could last five minutes instead.

Five minutes of hectic, seemingly uncontrollable bloodlust.

Though you don’t actually do much else during these events, the mass of players all shooting at a piece of rock becomes strangely entertaining.

You’re rewarded with a large chunk of experience and often decent weaponry, too. But no one cheers, no one emotes. Kill the beasts, grab the loot and they’re gone.

It’s perhaps the most impersonal MMO we’ve played in a long while, but it kind of works. Somehow.

Most of this is down to Defiance’s very accessible nature. It’s not a game you need to think about: simply boot up, pick a quest and kill. That’s really all there is to it.

At most you’ll need to consider where to spend EGO Points (class upgrades, basically) or whether one sniper rifle is better than another, but that’s about it.

If you were hoping for an in-depth MMO then don’t bother. Defiance won’t be for you. But if you’re happy just to boot up, grab a gun and unload one bullet after another then Defiance provides that itch to scratch by the caseload.

If this paints a pretty great image of Defiance then we’re glad. There’s plenty of content to tackle in Defiance, and it’s hugely enjoyable, albeit in a simplistic way. You should try it.

But it’s not perfect.

Defiance's Problems

Bugs are a problem for every MMO launch, but even still some of these are worth pointing out. Quests that cannot be completed due to broken objectives, enemy glitches and awkward vehicle controls are but a few of the issues surrounding Defiance.

The quests themselves have no real weight to them either. It’s not a game that requires much depth to its missions, but should you play for too long and it can feel a little too grindy – more than most MMOs, anyway.

A large part of this is because of the variety. While the main missions will often lead to more interesting environments or challenges, the tasks never change.

Defiance is a short burst kind of game; an evening’s worth of playtime before a break becomes necessary.

The world itself doesn’t inspire much in the way of exploration either. Though the different locales do subtly shift in aesthetics, there’s never really any reason to explore the world outside of finding new quests to collect.

The world of Defiance is not quite as rewarding as discovering Azeroth, exploring the galaxy in SWTOR or delving through lore in The Secret World.

Its story is largely throwaway, and this isn’t helped much by the fairly awkward voice acting and dialogue. There are a suitable number of different NPCs, but they’re mostly there to piece together the bits that Defiance does well – aimless combat and bloody-minded gunfire.

Defiance is fairly rough around the edges, and there are a number of concessions you’ll need to make the most of it. As a free-to-play game it would make sense, but there is a one-off fee to get involved.

With that said, however, there’s no denying that there’s a lot of hours of enjoyment hidden within. As with any MMO this is only the beginning and if Trion Worlds can iron out some of the bugs and keep the content coming then there’s every reason to get involved.

Whether that's now or in a couple of months time all comes down to the pleasure you get from shooting things. You monster. 

Version tested: PC

How important is originality?

That’s the most prominent question for our Bioshock Infinite review because while the game is undoubtedly brilliant, it’s not original. Not really.

Sure, the world is new and inventive, the characters are well-rounded and believable and a lot of what Bioshock is now known for is just as entertaining as it was in the original.

But then that’s the problem: the original. Bioshock set a precedent all those years ago and though it might seem unfair to compare Bioshock Infinite to its predecessor – especially because that is rather the point – the reason so many of you are excited is entirely because the original exists.

All this is taking emphasis away from what matters, though: Bioshock Infinite is a fantastic game, and if the original remains one of your favourite games of this generation then you owe it to yourself to play this.

The Floating City Of Columbia

The world of Columbia is – in a lot of ways – reminiscent of Rapture, and though the sea has been swapped for the sky, a lot of the ideology represented in Bioshock is present and correct here.

Though graphically Bioshock Infinite is not the best looking game yet – let’s not forget that Crysis 3 does exist – it is still one of the most visually interesting games yet.

It’s the art style that does it, with bright – almost blinding – colours filtering throughout your adventure. There’s a sense of caricature about Columbia, something whimsical yet sinister.

And that’s pretty much the point. It’s clear early on that there’s something dark ingrained into Columbia, and half of Bioshock Infinite is seeing that unravel.

There’s a level of quality and confidence about the game as a whole, in fact. It’s clear a lot of thought and effort has gone into not only the world of Columbia, but of the story it has to tell too.

You’ll play as Booker DeWitt: a mercenary, a killer, a war hero. Your goal is the retrieval of Elizabeth. She is the Lamb and you are the False Shepard, to use the game’s own terminology.

You'll realise quickly that there’s something strange happening, and not just within Columbia itself. We’re not about to spoil it for you since it is the lynchpin that Bioshock Infinite relies on, but throughout your time with the game the twist is consistently teased.

Telling A Tale In Bioshock Infinite

It’s a different method to the original Bioshock where the twist was a revelation, a mind-blowing surprise that turned not only the story but the whole concept of playing a game on its head.

In this sense Bioshock Infinite is much more cinematic, working more like a thriller as it builds up to an inevitable conclusion that you will invariably try and piece together yourself. 

Whether you prefer this method or not is subjective and entirely down to your personal tastes, but it’s not nearly as effective as a surprise twist.

The depth and atmosphere of Columbia isn’t quite as effective Rapture, either. Though there’s more detail in the world, the contrast between the light of the sun and darkness of shadows deters some of the atmosphere that could have been.

Though brief, the interiors of Columbia aren’t nearly as immersive as Rapture ever was. The first real potential for a little tension, for example, comes in the form of the Cult of the Raven, but even this is a wasted opportunity culminating in a large gunfight a little else.

Though Columbia is just as debauch as Rapture, its inhabitants aren’t nearly as unnerving. Splicers are a much more interesting enemy than any of Bioshock Infinite’s creations.

The Enemies Of Bioshock Infinite

The warriors of Columbia may fight in very similar ways to its Splicer brethren, but they’re not nearly as terrifying. As a result the enemies are just that: obstacles to overcome and little else.

Even the Tonic-enhanced super warriors, such as the Crow or the Burner, don’t provide much to really fear. As different as they are to take on, they don’t help mix up the variety much.

For the most part you’ll be tackling guys with guns throughout the entirety of Bioshock Infinite. You may choose to use the Bucking Bronco instead of Devil’s Kiss, but the combat will eventually begin to feel a little repetitive.

That’s something Splicers never had – they were adaptable, whether it was an aesthetic change to mimic your surroundings or a gameplay one in the way they fought.

Where Bioshock Infinite’s combat does improve is in its arena combat sections. Though you’ll filter through a number of corridors, it’s in the open environments that you’re rewarded a little more freedom.

Best of all is when the aerial Skylines are implemented to give you a real feeling of openness to the combat sections. Though you’ll spend most of your time sitting behind a barrel waiting for your shield to regenerate, which barrel you sit behind is entirely down to you.

You’re restricted to only two weapons at a time, and while this means you can’t stick to your tried and tested tactics for every battle (no electric crossbow bolts this time, kids) it also ensures that you’re looking for weaponry in the area around you.

The Handyman Can

Fans of the original Bioshock may lament that you’re forced into picking one of the weapons to hand rather than combining your favourite strategies, but it does mean you need to be more adaptable when in battle.

The inclusion of the Handyman really highlights this point: these guys are lumbering bullet sponges and you will, invariably, need to use everything the environment has to offer. 

Though you’ll only encounter a handful throughout the game they do make for intense battles. They’re not a replacement for the Big Daddy – not even slightly – but they do help to facilitate the style of combat that Bioshock Infinite is all about.

The only problem is the respawn system. The Vita Chambers were such an issue with Bioshock that the option to turn them off was patched in, and it just seems like Bioshock Infinite should have included the same.

Dying in battle will have Elizabeth bring you back from the brink of the abyss with a little bit of health and a little more ammo. Though your enemies regain some of their health, it’s not nearly enough of a punishment and it works to the detriment of combat.

There’s no real penalty for dying, to such an extent that it makes you care less in battle. If you die, so what? In fact, since you’ll respawn with more Salts (mana) and ammo, in many ways dying is preferable. And that’s not right.

Guiding Elizabeth Through Bioshock Infinite

Mercifully, Elizabeth never really proves a nuisance in battle, though this is largely thanks to the fact that enemies simply don’t target her.

Sometimes she’ll find cover right in the middle of the fray, even racing through the bullets and the blood to find a different barrel to hide behind.

She can be helpful, however, flinging recovery items or ammo your way whenever you run low. Outside of combat she’ll even throw money at you, like a treat for being such a good little guard dog.

So don’t worry, she’s not the needy little NPC you were afraid she was.

In fact, it’s the relationship that builds between Booker and Elizabeth that is the crowning achievement of Bioshock Infinite.

Bioshock Infinite is at its best when its story unfolds, and though it is one that is intentionally more complex than the original Bioshock it is an intriguing one all the same.

Everything else in between is just more of the same, and in some ways not nearly as great. Though the war between Columbians and the Vox Populi tackles interesting themes that videogames rarely touch, as enemies they’re just gun-toting marines in different skins.

So again, it comes down to the question of originality. Bioshock Infinite is by no means a bad game, and offers enough new that fans of the series will find it hard not to be immersed in its offerings.

But it’s hard to deny that the original Bioshock was praised so highly because it was so unique. Bioshock Infinite retreads a lot of the same ground, at least mechanically, but with parts that aren’t nearly as diverse or varied as its predecessor.

Its enemies are uninspired and its world not nearly as rich, but that still doesn’t stop Bioshock Infinite having the tools to give you a great time all the same.

Version tested: PC

After TellTale blew fans and critics away with its emotional point-and-click adventure take on The Walking Dead, any game bearing the franchise’s name had a lot to live up to.

And with the AMC series’ popularity, a game that tied in a little closer to that source material must have sounded like a good move to some executive along the line.

And lo, The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct was born.

Starring fan-favorite ear-collector Daryl Dixon and his fans-put-up-with-him-because-he’s-Michael-Rooker brother Merle, Survival Instinct sets out to give fans the untold story of how the hillbilly brothers survived the early days of the zombie outbreak before ending up at the campsite with Shane, Glenn, and the other survivors.

The chronology in the series dictates that not too much of consequence can happen to Daryl and Merle during the game, and in that sense The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct delivers in spades.

There is very little story to be had, and surprisingly very little entertaining brotherly banter to go along with it. This is Daryl’s story, with Merle playing a minor supporting role in a few levels after he is introduced halfway through the game.

The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct tries to take a sneaky approach to fighting the undead, encouraging you to crouch through hallways and pick off zombies one by one with stealth kills from behind.

The zombie AI, however, is far too inconsistent for that style of play, with no reliably discernable cone of vision for what will cause a zombie to realise your presence. Some will let you stand two feet away in safety while others will spot you through walls.

Even when one does notice fresh meat walking about it is difficult to take them as a credible threat as the hilarious pathfinding gets them stuck in doorframes, or any other piece of level geometry that shouldn’t normally pose an obstacle.

Once you are face to face with a zombie it comes down to your melee weapon, a hunting knife by default but everything from hammers, lead pipes, and fire axes can be found along the way.

Hitting a zombie is particularly unsatisfying, as it just pauses and stands there waiting for the next hit. There is the occasional jump scare, a supposedly “dead” zombie getting up as you pass by, for example, but there are few occasions where the game will expect you to fend off more than one or two zombies at a time.

Should you choose to fire a gun in an attempt to make things more interesting, the gunshot will finally grab the undead’s attention. It may even trigger a zombie swarm, essentially a quick-time event where each zombie patiently takes its turn shoving its face toward the screen while you aim a shaky reticule to land a killing blow.

These mob scenes can go on for a comically long time if you attract a large enough group, and hold the unique distinction of making face stabbings seem boring.

To its credit, The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct does at least make an attempt to offer something fresh outside of its questionable combat and AI.

The entire game is structured around a road trip of sorts, as Daryl drives across Georgia first looking for his brother Merle, then looking for a way to escape the looming undead.

Structurally it’s almost akin to Oregon Trail or, perhaps more accurately, akin to the recent indie parody Organ Trail.

While major towns and landmarks make up the actual story levels, much of the game takes place on the road watching a little dotted line on the map make its way from one town to the next.

Just like Oregon Trail, your road trip can be interrupted for any number of reasons, such as finding a spot to scavenge for supplies, cars blocking the road, your car breaking down, or simply running out of gas.

These roadblocks trigger miniature stages where you run about pushing stuck cars and finding fuel or a replacement car part to get back on your way.

The game even gives you a false choice by asking if you want to take back roads, regular roads, or the highway between destinations, which in theory should effect how many road stops you encounter.

For example, back roads offer more scavenging opportunities but punish you with high fuel consumption while highways are light on supply runs but your car breaks down more often.

In the end though, you’ll hit about the same number of pit stops regardless of the route, with the only difference being the type you encounter.

Since each encounter plays out essentially the same, in the same small number of maps, what could have been the game’s saving grace for variety turns into an exercise in tedium.

Even with the road encounters being the boring mess that they are, the road trip structure could have been salvaged if not for how The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct mismanages its inventory system.

For example, with the game emphasizing fuel consumption in the different routes, you would think that scavenging for supplies and hoarding fuel would be a viable survival skill.

Not so, as the car’s tank can only ever be filled to slightly above empty, with any remaining fuel taking up a valuable inventory space.

Daryl only has a small amount he can hold, so each inventory spot is precious, a matter that isn’t helped by the fact that one spot is permanently occupied by Daryl’s hunting knife even after far more effective melee weapons are found within the first hour.

There never seems to be a shortage of supplies on the ground, but you are still constantly running out of ammo and gear because there is not enough space to store and carry any of it.

It is an odd kind of frustration that sets in when you feel the need to conserve ammo while at the same time throwing away half of what you find.

Speaking of throwing things away, throughout the game Daryl has opportunities to rescue survivors that he meets. At the end of the level they will join your caravan, which only has a limited number of room, so most will be abandoned and left for dead shortly after saving their lives.

All of this is done through menus without any dialog, so there is clearly no attempt made to turn it into a moral dilemma that would actually speak to the themes present in every other representation of The Walking Dead.

Survivors are just another resource, which you can send off to search for supplies while you are playing the story levels. Supplies that you inevitably won’t have room for in your inventory, and that could get the survivors killed while they are searching.

Like so many elements in The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct, the survivors are an idea that could have been interesting but instead come across as a pointless afterthought due to poor implementation.

With another year of development to flesh out its more ambitious idea of a zombie-killing road trip, The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct may have actually become a good game.

It’s a long shot given the hurdles it would still have to overcome from its boring combat, questionable AI, and repetitive locales, but certainly possible.

What’s saddest though is that the game also fails on the level of fanservice, when die-hard fans of the show are the most likely to overlook it’s technical shortcomings.

Norman Reemus and Michael Rooker may lend their voices to Daryl and Merle Dixon, but the line delivery is lifeless in a story that adds little of substance to the characters. 

Maybe no one was expecting greatness on the level of TellTale’s episodic game from The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct, but there are brief fleeting moments when Terminal Reality’s game shows that there was a real vision for something good.

The vision didn’t hold though, and players are instead left with a listless shambling husk of what the game could have been.

Version Tested: PC

StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm is all about subtle evolution and little choices having a bigger impact than you expect. It's an overriding theme touching just about every aspect of Blizzard Entertainment's long-awaited follow up to StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty.

It not only drives its space opera narrative, which focuses on the physical and character evolution of the Queen of Blades Sarah Kerrigan and her Zerg Swarm, but is reflected in how Blizzard has tried to bring more variety to its campaign and very demanding multiplayer, evolving them both in small ways that make a big difference to their successful formulas.

Heart Of The Swarm's Queen Of Blades

Heart of the Swarm's campaign starts exactly where Wings of Liberty ended with Kerrigan, now human again through the efforts of her lover and series hero Jim Raynor, and wracked with guilt over the millions she slaughtered as the Queen of Blades.

But with the pair leading the rebellion against Dominion tyrant Arcturus Mengsk, it isn't long before they're violently separated, with Raynor presumed dead.

A grief-stricken Kerrigan vows revenge, embarking on a dark quest to reclaim her mantle as Queen of Blades and scattered Swarm no matter the cost to her humanity.

Sure, Heart of the Swarm is melodramatic, even vaguely clichéd space opera at times, but for those invested in its characters, there's more than enough heart in the telling, and a compulsive desire to see what comes next.

Activision Blizzard's Polished Clipscenes

Once again Blizzard tells its story between RTS missions using a mixture of impressive cutscenes and a point-and-click style hub aboard Kerrigan's living ship 'The Leviathan' where you interact with her very alien entourage just as you did with the human crew in Wings of Liberty. 

It manages to make these alien creatures fairly relatable, with your Evolution Master, the creepy Nazi scientist like Abathur being a particular stand out, but ironically, with only two areas, this 'living ship' doesn't feel quite as alive as more varied The Hyperion did.

But Blizzard really brings the Zerg story to life with interesting additions to StarCraft II gameplay.

It was accused of polishing the traditional base-building formula to a gleaming finish while ignoring modern changes the genre in 'Wings', and Heart of the Swarm draws upon the WarCraft III's hero units and a tiny echo of Dawn of War II to thrust Kerrigan into battle as a key unit in response.

Heart Of The Swarm's Missions

While Wings of Liberty's missions were elevated by a clever focus upon Terran strengths, namely their mobility, Heart of the Swarm focuses on the Zergs' overwhelming aggression in the course of its 27 odd missions.

Kerrigan embodies that, able to take on enemies' armies, smashing large units, instantly evolving her minions or summoning giant Zerg horrors to battle.

Kerrigan allows you to be constantly aggressive in a new way and her increasingly powerful special abilities, which can be changed between missions, are developed through a tiered RPG system.

But Kerrigan isn't the only creature you develop as you re-gather your Swarm. There are a host of familiar and new Zerg on offer and in a refinement of Wings upgrade system you're given a choice of three upgrades for each class, usually based on speed, damage or defence which can be swapped out at any time in your Evolution Chamber.

As you progress you encounter Evolution Missions that offer different 'Strains' of Zerg. These are binary choices, once you evolve, say, Spawn Hosts that fire clutches of flying Locusts over a type that can instantly burrow to any creep covered location, the other choice is locked out.

It's an interesting system supporting individual play-styles, it's just a shame Evolution Missions are only limited tutorials. Naturally many campaign specific units aren't present in the highly balanced multiplayer suite, nor are most evolutionary upgrades, but they showcase Blizzard's imagination and make you feel powerful in its frantic set pieces. 

Your evolved Swarm tackles a variety of missions that start simply but soon have you juggling multiple objectives simultaneously, like defending a hive while securing points on a map under time pressure.

Heart Of The Swarm: Kerrigan & Physics

Blizzard has also thrown in boss battles that pit Kerrigan and her brood against powerful, giant enemies and while not particularly difficult they're action packed and add a fresh flavour, as do worlds featuring environmental hazards like flash freeze snow storms or rising lava.

Heart of the Swarm's new physics engine really showcases these ideas, we just wish there were more.

These changes under the hood bring StarCraft II's intense RTS combat life more than ever as bodies explode in gouts of viscera and cartwheel through the air in explosions or writhe in incandescent and gruesome agony when killed by fire and acid, while mechanical units blow apart in showers of sparks and metal – you really feel hip deep in massive intergalactic combat.

It isn't all just sound and fury, with improved AI path finding evident as you direct your gore slathering Zerg who are also easier to control thanks to an improved interface also brought to multiplayer.

While this campaign isn't as deep as Wings' and old hands will benefit from cranking up the difficulty, it is great fun. You feel vaguely dirty but its hard not to revel in playing the merciless Zerg driven by Kerrigan's rage.

By Heart of the Swarms' end you'll have seen her and the Swarm evolve narratively into something new, and will be chomping at the bit for StarCraft II Legacy of the Void.

Heart Of The Swarm: Multiplayer

While the epic narrative and interesting changes to the campaign are welcome, for most StarCraft II fans it's the blisteringly competitive multiplayer that drives their obsession.

They won't be disappointed with changes to Heart Of The Swarm's multiplayer, including seven new units (two Terran, three Protoss and two Zerg) that give players more flexibility in match ups against all three races.

The Terrans get a flame thrower wielding mech trooper in the Hellbat which frankly does horrific splash damage to light units and upgraded transforms into a Hellion.

With it's high DPS on light, it's great for bio crowd control and ground based protection to Siege Tanks. Their second new boon is the Widow Mine, which burrows and launches a missile for massive damage to light ground and air units.

They can only be revealed and destroyed with a detector, so despite long cool-downs they can bloodily wipe out swathes of light units or workers, defend vulnerable spots and luring foes into minefields can turn the tide of battle.

We found both new Terran units particularly augmented by one of numerous little changes to existing units, specifically the Medivac's new Ignite Afterburner ability.

With good micro lightening quick troop drops and escapes are possible with Hellbat or Widow Mines drops into a vulnerable Natural or Mineral line particularly devastating on an opponents economy.

The Protoss additions start with the versatile Mothership core. Able to be produced quite early, its Mass Recall ability allows for scouting or early Protoss aggression without going all-in, as troops can be teleported back to the Nexus.

Combined with the enemy-slowing Time Warp and its defensive Photon Overcharge, which places a powerful cannon on your Nexus, the Mothership gives Protoss players more options compared to Wings of Liberty.

The Tempest Unit

Finally, with the Oracle they gain another support vessel that makes early StarGate builds more viable.

While lacking in health its Pulsar Beam, Time Warp and Revelation abilities are a gift to players looking to harass opponents early.

But Blizzard hasn't neglected the Zerg, giving them two highly effective new nasties.

The first is the Swarm Host, which burrows and casts swarms of tough acid spitting locust at foes.

Being a cast unit, the locusts only last 15 seconds but they can be constantly punishing, finally giving the Zerg a good ground based siege unit perfect for putting pressure on opponents, or defending in the mid-game rather than having to wait for Brood Lords.

The new Zerg flying unit, the Viper, has a dirty range hampering blinding cloud ability, and it can syphon energy off friendly units.

Heart Of The Swarm: Abduct ability

We've seen its Abduct ability used in clever ways to isolate powerful units like Colossi, and even whip armies across gaps into undefended bases and Mineral lines. Underestimate it at your peril.

Online StarCraft players are quickly coming to grips with these units and the new maps.

Just which race has benefited most from this expansion is still hotly debated by the community, but it's already clear that Blizzard has managed to give players more ways to raise their game no matter their skill level.

Heart of the Swarm's multiplayer seems more versatile and action-packed than Wings Of Liberty's, thanks to faster units and greater potential for harassment. 

It helps that StarCraft II hasn't just grown as a game, and that Blizzard has evolved Battle.net's social platform, bringing Unranked Matchmaking, full Clan support, a raft of new tutorials and new features to its replay system.

The best addition is Take Command, which allows you to jump in and take control at any point in a replay, allowing you to train and refine tactics or even take over during famous games between professional players and see how you do.

There's more than enough here to fully engage StarCraft II fans while we wait for the series' final chapter. Hopefully the wait won't be quite as long.

Before we go into our SimCity review proper, it's worth pointing out - just in case you weren't already aware - that the game has had quite a number of launch issues.

Thanks, in large part, to the required always-on internet connection, SimCity is not a game for anyone who refuses to accept such an unnecessary and forced method of DRM.

To those people, SimCity is a 0/10 and absolutely shouldn't buy it. There's no guarantee the servers will become 100% smooth, nor even that the game will work once the servers are inevitably closed, whenever that may be.

The same goes for anyone hoping to play SimCity on-the-go on their laptop, or those who get frustrated when their routers disconnect. Everyone else, however, may want to consider Maxis' latest SimCity.

Because there's no doubt about it; SimCity is the most considered, most in-depth and most appealing SimCity game to date.

The tilt-shift aesthetic might be incongruous with fans expectations and the overhaul of some fairly radical mechanical elements might scare the most diehard, but that doesn't stop this being the most compelling SimCity game yet.

So it's a shame that it comes with just as many criticisms as it does praise: point to any positive aspect of Maxis' latest city builder and you'll find another equal and opposite negative.

SimCity Timelapse

It's a game that, though finely honed, is not perfect in structure, which will leave many of the series most devout players feeling more than a little irritable.

It is worth noting that this is perhaps the most accessible SimCity game to date: it's hard to pinpoint why, maybe the colourful and playful sounds and visuals, the pleasing tilt-shift effect as you hone in on a specific part of your fledging town or perhaps the immediacy and ease of use that comes with the multiple, infographic-themed data layers.

Most likely, however, it's a combination of all three.

It’s the visuals that first drag you in, though. Not only does this look like a game you'll want to play, but it sounds like one too.

The melodic – and strangely familiar – tunes accompanying SimCity are a testament to the sound engineers at Maxis: somehow, someway, they always manage to nail that sense of pure happiness.

The sound effects tagging onto each building 'plop', every road stretch or any click-click-click of zoning help construct this image of SimCity as a model of a city rather than a game.

Meanwhile the myriad cheers as a park is placed onto the land or an impressive cultural landmark rises from the ground not only helps inform you of a job well done, it makes it feel personal. It makes it feel fun.

Multiple Cities In SimCity

As such each region in this new SimCity is a playground, a toybox of building materials that gives way to genuine creativity.

In the past SimCity focused primarily on fitting as many Sims into a space as possible, but here there's so much more freedom to it.

Sure, the size of your city's population is one aspect, but maybe you'll target education instead or perhaps focus on creating a safe and secure environment for all your residents.

Tourism, trade, utilities, industry, commercial, residential; all viable specialisations your city can adhere to. Each new city provides a new opportunity, and it'll take a very long time before starting anew becomes tiresome.

What can become a pain, however, is the city size limit. It has been a valid concern for fans throughout the game's development and after extended hands-on with the final game there's unfortunately no silver lining.

But it's not the desire to expand beyond the borders that is an issue, it's the lack of space to build within.

There might not sound like much difference between the two, but consider this: once you've laid the basic foundation for your city – the roads, the zones and potential spots to build upgraded utilities – you're not left looking to place more, instead you're struggling for space to fill with any necessary structures.

How Does SimCity Cope With City Size Limit?

Take the need for mass transit: rail connections, buses, streetcars, boats and even airports are the five choices you have, but it's impossible to have all of them.

Forcing choices is an important part of the new SimCity – and this is just one way in which it provides a challenge – but this can often feel unfairly restrictive, especially when your own citizens demand everything from each and every city you build.

Thankfully the multi-region gameplay resolves some of these issues; beefing up on police, fire or health coverage in one city nearby can then be volunteered to assist in those severely lacking.

If one city is in desperate need for workers then Sims looking for work in outlying cities will commute over, with the same being true for commercial and residential desires.

But as with a lot of aspects to SimCity, even this comes with its own downfalls.

Firstly, despite suggestions of up to 16 cities working symbiotically together, the truth is that – at most – only four will work in tandem. Everything else is built onto the same region, but has no real connectivity beyond that.

This makes multiplayer particularly restrictive if you're hoping to fill all 16 of those cities with friends.

Watch Your City Grow

Worst of all is the frustrating crossover, however, where unrequited parts of one city will filter through to another and the elements you do desire don't.

While crime and pollution is expected, it is – in fact – education and wealth that prove the biggest threat.

You may be focusing on dirty coal or oil production in one city, for example, but all your low-tech industry becomes filled with educated, high-tech Sims from another.

This would be fine, but it then causes the inhabitants of the very city you're working on to be put out of work while the high-level tech buildings demand educated workers that never existed in the first place.

It's a frustrating balance that could quite easily infect any one of your cities.

A rather crude metaphor for SimCity, then, is to call it a sandbox on a seesaw. You're free to play around until your heart's content, but the underlying mechanics aren't always reliable.

But then no one said building a city – no, a collection of cities – could be distilled into an exact science. Though many of the systems pinning the GlassBox engine together can be awkward, they're at the very least always providing an obstacle to overcome.

SimCities That Keep On Growing

Whether intended or not, the erratic nature of the region play and enforced city limits does make you continually evaluate the options open to you.

This turns your game time in a gradual and careful evolution: your environments will grow out of the very ground around you, adapting to the challenges you face or the restrictions placed upon you.

This is what SimCity really does well, and once you've started it'll be tough to stop. There's a natural and uncontrollable progression to your cities as you tweak your utilities, boost your cash flow and gradually improve the happiness of your populace.

There's a personality to every city you work on, not only with the individual comings and goings of the Sims within but with their very design too.

Initially some of the decisions surrounding SimCity's mechanics may seem frustrating, especially for diehard fans of the series, but give it time and you'll realise – in spite of all of this – this is actually the best SimCity game yet.

Ultimately we come down to this new argument of reviewing 'games as services' rather than products.

Maxis has already said that it intends to keep updating SimCity, and it has even been suggested that the limited 2k by 2k could be expanded in the future - thus undoing a rather large part of our criticism.

When it comes down to it, playing SimCity is just fun. The piecemeal upgrades that your city goes through might not sound like a barrel of laughs, but there's a quiet compulsion to carefully building a metropolis out of nothing.

Disclaimer: The War Z was originally launched on December 17th 2012 but suffered all sorts of problems on released - we've got a full breakdown of what went wrong. Rather than review it then, we've waited to see if the developer's promises to fix the problems have come to fruition so 10 weeks after its initial release, this is our The War Z review.

Suddenly, I awake in a forest. Where exactly is unknown. All I know is it's somewhere in Colorado, and that I'm completely alone. This is how my survival adventure starts, an adventure into the War Z.

Day 1

After creating a character from a wide array of six options, I took my mustachioed hick into the War Z. In my bag I find a torch, some bandages, a can of drink, a cereal bar and a map of the game world. I'm near a safe zone apparently, and eager to get my bearings (and maybe find other players), so I head off in that direction. Mustache McHick walks almost vertically up a cliff face as a mysterious musical cue suddenly plays to break the absolute silence. Spooky.

After receiving some damage from the act of walking down a hill, a big message flashes on the screen that helpfully points out HEY GUNS DON'T WORK HERE. The message just sort of hangs there as I walk into a completely deserted stronghold. It looks the task, with what are probably pointless watchtowers and strengthened bunkers and such. Aside from these hollow buildings, there is nothing here.

According to hunger and thirst metres, Freddie Mercury is getting both hungry and thirsty, and frankly I'm bored of wandering around Blandsville. There's a big city on the map near this safe zone, and being aware of how these ultra-sim games work, I head off in that direction for supplies.

The city walls appear through a clearing in the trees, and there's an honest to God zombie there! I've been playing for about twenty minutes and it's the fir-OK that was a gunshot. And another, but that sounded closer, go prone. Don't move. Wait, what if they shoot in the same location?

Move.

The sight and sound metres suddenly shoot up as I jankily slide-shuffle along the ground. I decide to change direction and move towards denser, shadowy undergrowth, but that doesn't change them. I zig-zag around a bit before stopping completely. A few minutes go by, and I take the risk of getting into a crouch. Nothing happens. Satisfied with a successful evasion, I continue onto the city, only to see a group of zombies standing in front of the nearest entrance. Hanging by the trees, I crawl around to find another opening, but at each one there's more zombies.

After five minutes, a road into the city signals a clear path, with plenty of buildings just inside to explore. Side-crawling like a crab with stumpy legs, I avoid a zombie on the other side of the road and enter the first building. It's completely empty, with bare walls and two rooms. I get up and head towards a second exit, and suddenly my footsteps are making huge clunking sounds, which completely disappear the moment I leave the building. Alright.

No time to process that though, as a loud groaning sound fills the air, seemingly extremely close. Spinning around to see where it comes from contorts My Name is Earl's body with a certain grace that only the finest ragdoll physics can deliver. There's nothing there, but it's getting dark, and I haven't found anything of value. Time to pick an easier target, just as soon as these legs catch up with the rest of the body.

I forgot about the zombie on the other side of the road as I leave the town though. His scream as I wander into him attracts a horde of the undead, so I peg it. Luckily it seems you run faster than the zombies, and the stamina bar lasts for ages. They gave up chase just as I run out of steam, so I pull up my map and head towards a farm.

There are zombies all over the place, but I think I see items beyond the fence. It seems to be the dead of night, but it's light enough that I wonder if the torch serves any purpose other than the straight arm karate-chop ol' Ron Swanson can do with it. Dancing the worm expertly, three zombies fail to see me go by, and I marvel at how close I got to one of them with my wicked sick breaking.

My exuberance is abruptly halted when I bump into a zombie hidden in the grass, who then stands up. Shocked at the turn of events, I fumble with the keyboard, and he gets one good strike in before I can run. I want those bloody items though, I’ve been playing almost an hour, so I run straight past him to my prize. A metre fills up while I stand over a hammer, and every zombie on the farm is now after me. I torch-chop the lead and he stumbles back, giving me the chance to run away, unfortunately without my loot. However, my stamina hasn't refilled, so I don't get very far. Mustache-man goes down batting zombies away with a torch.

There's an hour wait until I can respawn.

Day 2

I spawn right outside the farm where I died. I have no items. I’m beginning to wonder what was even the point of waiting to play again then. I had decided to read up on the game wiki between play sessions, and found out a couple of things.

Firstly, there are usually items around when you spawn. I can't find any. Secondly, the musical cue I heard on my way to the safe zone yesterday meant a player character was near. Apparently, it's a miracle I didn't get shot the moment I spawned, a problem the developers have been trying to fix for a while. Perhaps they did then, although they were also supposed to have fixed damage while walking down a steep incline. Either way, it probably also means the shooting near the city may have just been background noises.

In broad daylight, I make my way back to the farm. There are fewer zombies this time, and I find a bottle of water and a gun. A pistol, Jericho 9mm. I'm fairly sure a Jericho 941 doesn't take 9mm rounds, but I didn't choose the thug life.

It turns out the farm was across the road from some houses, so I walk past a few zombies that don't seem to really care about me, and find some food and a bigger back pack. This is going well so far, even if the houses are boring, and the textures are absolutely terrible. In fact this entire game looks pretty terrible, the zombies jankily walk about with a handful of animation frames, and my Tom Selleck dude seems to use the basic model from one of those budget 3D animation programs.

I hear the slasher flick suspense musical cue, and decide it's time to get to a safe zone and deposit some of this stuff in my universal chest. Apparently that is a thing that exists, I guess I didn't explore every bland, featureless building from the other safe zone. After a ten-minute hike around the lake, because swimming hasn't been added to the game yet and there's an invisible wall around water, I see another person. This is the first time I've seen another player in the game. I follow him slowly and draw my piece, because I ain't playing. He disappears through some trees in the direction of the city, and I go in the opposite direction.

Suddenly I'm being injured and a guy has hit me a couple of times with a hammer and I'm dead. Not the guy I had been tailing, and there had been no creepy music cue for about twenty minutes. That’s a pretty pointless mechanic then.

Day 3

I delete my character and start again. It doesn't take very long to make the mustache hick, and this time I go to choose a server. There are some options I can filter by, such as map type and game type. Currently, there is only one map and one game type right now. Reluctantly, I decide on a server, one with plenty of players. That should make it more fun.

I spawn and get immediately shot.

Day 3 Part 2

I delete my character and start again. I then choose a server with fewer people in it, and spawning does not result in instant death. I'm near the farm bit again, and the map labels a point of interest as Rifle Ridge or something. Thinking I can get a better gun from there, I head in that direction. A zombie, dressed like a British Policeman in the American heartland, runs up to me. I proceed to beat him to death over the course of five minutes with my torch-chop. I get five experience for my efforts, a surprise as I hadn't even seen an experience bar. Another zombie runs up to me, and I kill him much faster with a handful of chops. Another five experience. Did the other zombie have body armour?

I check the pause menu in an attempt to investigate the experience points, and notice there's a Mission tab. I'd been over half the map, and not once had I seen anything that gave a quest, but for a brief glimmering moment I wondered if there was actually something to do in this vile game.

While I was paused though, a patrolling robot zombie bumped into me, and apparently ten experience is not enough to take on two zombies at once with my incredible murdering torch.

Day 4

The ten experience I got yesterday means nothing. You can unlock costumes with experience, but it costs in the region of 150,000 experience just for the first one. There's also the option to buy items with real money or in game money, the latter I did not even know existed.

You can spend a few pounds to get some weapons and loads of ammo, but what you would do with this though is puzzling – gathering supplies seems to be the only activity in this game as the quest tab in the options menu is for a function that doesn't exist yet. The idea is that eventually players can make quests in the useless safe zone areas, giving bounties for killing characters that probably were paying to win in the first place. This sounds like a great source of the in game currency, good thing it's so integral to the game play then.

I run around a bit at a loss with what to do. Every building is boring. The farm no longer has a gun, so I can't shoot my way into the city to see how that would work. There's only one thing left to do then: go to Norad.

Norad is labeled on the map, this solitary map of Colorado. For those that don't know, Norad tracks satellites and spanners and missiles in space, and they operate from a goddamn hollowed out mountain in Colorado. An underground, evil genius mountain lair. The home of the Stargate. Maybe, just maybe, the War Z can redeem itself with a charmingly janky recreation of the Cheyenne Mountain Complex.

The War Z did not redeem itself.

Some aircraft hangers stood along some concrete inside a fence, with a couple of empty buildings with fake ventilation piping and a satellite dish next to them. There's a scope for a gun hovering slightly off the floor in one of the buildings, and another bottle of water on a roof.

Disappointed, I walk into a hanger to see a predator drone with some scaffolding around it. A zombie attacks so I kill it with my torch. I stare as the low-res body falls to the floor, a floor textured like an N64 game. I am disgusted for having played this game so long, and welcome death as a curious zombie screams at me.

Maybe this is sharp critique on the brutal nature of survival, and how small glimmers of hope from finding something useful will inevitably lead way to you just giving up and welcoming death. Or, it's a quick cash-in rushed to market with the minimum possible quality control and little intention on delivering the product they promised.

Ah, puzzle games, the last bastion of the indie developer. When the world consumes itself with one triple-A shooter after another, indies cast aside their Call Of Duty distaste for something a little more lateral.

The problem is if you've played games at all in the past two or three years then chances are you've played every possible iteration of a puzzle game just by virtue of playing games.

Such is the unoriginality of the genre, unfortunately, but that makes The Bridge all the more compelling.

Though its overarching mechanic – namely the ability to rotate the world – has been seen in one form or another throughout gaming's history, its implementation here is fairly unique.

Think Escher style art if it was made into a puzzle game and you'd be surprisingly close to what The Bridge manages.

And much like the artist's inimitable style, The Bridge is capable of just as many mind-breaking, head-scratching, grey-matter-tickling levels of confusion. Again, it's all part and parcel of the game.

The objective is simple: navigate your sketchbook drawn character along floors and across ceilings until you reach the exit door. Sometimes you'll need a key, other times your task is to sensible evade a ball with a gurning face on it.

The art style might look drab and uninspiring, but it adds to the unique tone of the world.

Though the puzzles become harder and the challenges more complex, the underlying mechanic never changes. That's the hallmark of a damn fine puzzle game, where the gamer doesn't need to relearn the tools with each new task.

That's not to say that each level provides the same tasks: each chapter, signalled by a new door in central house, represents a new 'type' of challenge.

Initially this is vortexes, which act as black holes dragging in everything into its centre and never letting go. After that it's inversion – which lets you alter the flow of gravity – and so on.

All the while, the same main mechanics tying the game together remain unaltered – rotate to turn walls into floors and so on.

There's a decent level of challenge and anyone not a fan of puzzle games – or lateral thinking in general – will likely find themselves stuck on later levels.

And truth be told there are a number of times that you might stumble upon the solution, quickly tapping 'W' to enter the exit door before whatever inexplicable mistake had you come across the answer.

It's a curse of many puzzle games that rely so heavily on physics-based challenges, and mercifully this doesn't happen often. The puzzles are – for the most part – logical, and that's all you could really hope for.

It's levels like this that really highlight the Escher inspiration.

It's also worth pointing out that The Bridge is a little short. Though you may find yourself stuck on some of the later levels, you'll still find the games handful of levels completed within three or four hours.

While The Bridge never feels hurried or even lacking – more puzzles could've made the game feeling repetitive – the price of £12 does seem just a little bit too steep for what you actually get.

Still, completing the game unlocks you Mirror World – not to be mistaken with the small room of The Mighty Boosh – that pits you against tougher equivalents of all the puzzles you've previously completed.

This does add a new level of challenge but it is admittedly a little bit of a cheap ploy to creating new content and you likely won't feel compelled to go back and recomplete those puzzles all over again.

Set at the height of the Roaring Twenties, Omerta opens with the player character stepping straight off the boat from Sicily and directly into the dark heart of Atlantic City, USA.

This is the fabled Land of Opportunity, and thanks to prohibition, anyone with a few good connections, the right resources and above all, a willingness to get their hands dirty has a chance to make their fortune – and then some. Here, crime does pay.

After a few introductory screens where you’ll choose text options that shape your gangster’s formative years and their starting stats, Omerta’s story driven Campaign Mode lets you loose on the city, and you’ll soon recruit your first lackeys.

Though at first seemingly hired on the strength of their textbook mobster names alone, as more henchmen are unlocked you’ll come to appreciate the unique skills, specialities, and more detailed tactical thinking they bring to the table, as they each level up through experience gained under your enigmatic employment.

All of the characters in Omerta are painted with broad, archetypal brushstrokes, so it’s with an air of familiarity that you welcome French Femme Fatales, smooth-talking snipers and weedy, pistol-toting lickspittles into your fold.

Through deploying your goons to explore city maps and unlocking points of interest, you’ll slowly begin to acquire buildings, resources, and influence, steadily securing the foundations of your criminal empire. By renting premises and repurposing them, you can establish a variety of shady businesses – like an illegal brewery or a pawn shop quietly manufacturing firearms in a dusty back room.

You can also take on odd-jobs from some of the city’s most influential figures; everyone from corrupt cops and opportunistic soldiers to society girls and Irish immigrants are looking to trade in beer, liquor, firearms, and storage. Money comes to you both clean and dirty and you’ll need a healthy supply of both, so laundering, wherever and however you can, is also a factor.

The majority of player actions during this strategic portion of the game will attract attention from the authorities, shown in the bottom right hand of the screen as the Heat meter. Once this maxes out, an investigation against you will be launched. To avoid incarceration, you can bribe the detectives, call in a favour from a friendly deputy or even find and eliminate a key witness to your trial.

Expanding your territory and strong-arming citizens is all well and good, but there will be instances where the cops or crime kingpin competition will rise up against you, and this is where the tactical, turn-based combat element of the game comes into play.

After choosing your best men and women, you’ll enter a field of battle, and opposing cronies will need to be eliminated. Each character possesses points for moving and separate points for performing actions like shooting, intimidating, or using more specialist skills and perks. Learning to utilise cover, especially during early missions where missed action ratios are high, is crucial to victory.

Recruiting henchmen with a variety of weapons and status effects is helpful, and ensures an entertaining variety of attacks – with tommy guns, shotguns and rifles providing the edge over longer distance and pistols and fists doing the job at close range.

It’s solid enough action, but provides nothing new for RTS fans, and with rather basic action animations, firefights lack flavour or any real sense of satisfaction. Online co-operative and competitive combat modes include Gang Wars, Bank Heist, Jailbreak and Get The Money, but aside from letting you team up with or face off against a friend, these don’t provide any deeper layers of complexity or challenge. There’s also a practise-friendly Sandbox mode, where you can organise crime without being hampered by story-based missions.

Switching regularly between the strategy of the city to the confines of turn-based combat and back again helps keep things interesting, but the option to auto-resolve smaller skirmishes rather than navigating away from the level map is a welcome feature for when you’re too engrossed in selling on a batch of bootlegged beer for more than you bought it for.

Setting up and maintaining a steady cashflow early on in a level is easy enough, but resource collection often presents a pacing problem. At times you’re simply left to wait for the numbers to tick upwards before you can move on, with not a lot to do in the meantime. This wouldn’t feel quite so pronounced if the game gave players anything much to look at whilst waiting.

One of the joys of strategy titles, aside from when those once-dwindling resource numbers start to soar, is seeing a map begin to bend to your will. This feeling is sorely missed in Omerta, as buildings you take over don’t change to visually represent the businesses you’re setting up inside them.

Though it wouldn’t be exactly prudent to have a neon sign pointing to your underground speakeasy, some small visual clue, some subtle mark of ownership - aside from a spinning brown icon on top – would give the map a much needed sense of gradual domination. Likewise, when you send a character to pull off a raid, a firebombing, or a drive-by shooting of a rival business, you don’t really see or feel much excitement or involvement.

It’s this lack of feedback that prevents Omerta: City Of Gangsters from ever really taking off. You see your baseball bat crack the head of an advancing thug, but it doesn’t leave much of an impression. Your numbers tell you that you’re both feared and admired by criminals and citizens alike, but Atlantic City, outwardly at least, doesn’t seem to notice you’re even there.

You never get to feel like the pinstriped-suited crime boss you are. Omnipresent you may be, but you’re lacking in potency or any meaningful presence.

Omerta: City Of Gangsters does well in capturing the atmosphere of a memorable time and place in history. Gin-soaked speakeasies and sepia-toned shootouts provide colourful context for some fun turn-based power struggles but sadly, the strategy never feels complex or deep enough to be truly fulfilling.

Version Tested: PC

There’s always an air of apprehension around the release of a Kickstarted game: will it be a disappointment? Is there some obvious game-breaking flaw? Have all the promises – and with it our hopes and dreams – been crushed by a developer unable to fulfil these tough expectations?

All fair questions, of course, but we’ll save them for another day, because Strike Suit Zero good. Really good.

Your thoughts on Kickstarter – and its benefits to the games industry – will likely rely on just how much you like playing Call Of Duty. That might seem like a bizarre statement, but hear us out.

You don’t get COD clones on Kickstarter, instead you get strategy games, classic isometric RPGs and – in the case of Strike Suit Zero – space flight combat games.

All dead genres, in the eyes of the traditional publisher anyway. Yet Strike Suit Zero proves there is enjoyment to be found in these types of games still, and though it’s fairly typical of the genre it’s still a worthy addition all the same.

You play a fighter pilot and his allies as they attempt to fight back against a seemingly unstoppable aggressor. The odds of survival are slim, but Earth’s continued existence is at stake, so you soldier on.

Some of the stages have really gorgeous backdrops.

It’s a little contrived, admittedly, but then this was a game designed to be typical of the genre. Reinvention was not a goal Born Ready is targeting, merely recreation.

As such many of the missions follow fairly similar patterns. An uninhabited space station doesn’t stay that way for long, while bombing runs on supply stations are familiar to anyone who’s dabbled in the genre before.

But none of this really matters: the combat itself is wonderfully executed, and the feeling of zipping around battle arenas taking out enemy fighters is an experience that’s been very much missed.

You’ll begin with two types of weapons but the choices soon start to build up, so much so that customising your setup can feel as important as your skills in battle.

There’s a delicate balance between rotational dogfight and strafing runs on larger targets, so it never really feels like you’re doing the same thing.

It’s pretty tough too – in a good way – so though most missions will only take 15-20 minutes each, understanding your attack patterns and keeping a steady eye on your shield bar is a necessity to survive through to the end.

Enemies can warp in and out - the last fighter usually teleports out, which is a nice touch to highlight your dominance.

The unique twist here is the mecha transformation, which is unlocked in the third mission. Here you’ll take control of the Strike Suit, a fighter plane with the ability to transform into a mech for unstoppable – albeit brief – power.

As you kill enemies you’ll earn ‘Flux’, an additional meter that limits the use of the Strike Suit. This builds up fairly quickly, however, rewarding you with short but thrilling bouts of devastating force.

With the ability to deftly dodge incoming missiles, lock onto multiple targets and halt the gradual and uncontrollable drift of space flight the Strike Suit is best used in bursts, powering through tough targets or decimating hordes of incoming torpedoes.

And it’s this sense of spectacle that Strike Suit Zero has really mastered. Each time you return to battle after chasing down a stray fighter ship you’re greeted with the sight of an epic battle: cannon fire, homing missiles and more than a few explosions provide a thrilling view as your thrusters kick into gear and you get stuck in once more.

It’s consistent too: this display of colours – set to a variety of unique near-planet backdrops – continues to amaze even as you progress further into the game.

We’d compare it to the over-the-top sense of scale seen in Michael Bay’s Transformers films, but that’s perhaps doing a disserve to the depth of Strike Suit Zero’s combat.

Clever use of the mech suit is vital to survive certain sections.

With only 13 missions Strike Suit Zero is over fairly quickly – even with the multiple restarts factored in – but there’s still plenty of replayability in each of them.

Combat medals are rewarded for your speed and success, while additional upgrades are unlocked for completing alternative objectives during each mission.

Once all four ship variants are unlocked, too, you can return to a mission to tackle it with your favourite loadout to try and improve your score or earn the challenging highest medal rank.

There’s no faulting the quality of Strike Suit Zero, and a lot of effort has gone into recreating the classic space combat genre that has been so vacant from the games industry this generation.

That said a handful of frame rate issues are a slight disappointment when a game like this relies so heavily of fast reactions.

And despite the sheer excitement that Strike Suit Zero does provide, there isn’t much – brilliant mech suit aside – to distinguish it from the space combat games that came before it.

But then that probably isn’t a critcism: at least 4,484 people felt that Strike Suit Zero was worth backing, and in all honesty it’s enough just to be able to play a modern take on an otherwise extinct genre.

Born Ready has done a fantastic job of diluting what made flight combat games so much fun, and added in a couple of neat features all its own. One for genre fans, but highly recommended.

PlanetSide 2 is - if nothing else - the perfect example of a PC game. It has a scale rarely seen in videogames, some of the best visuals yet and it's free-to-play. What's not to like?

For those unaware – despite it being popular, PlanetSide still had a degree of anonymity – PlanetSide 2 is a huge, open world FPS MMO where three factions vie for control over three different continents.

If you're in need of a comparison then Battlefield 3 is probably PlanetSide 2’s closest companion. Imagine the high-quality visuals, the huge battle arenas and the emergent vehicle-based combat all bundled into an ever-changing open world.

Sounds exciting? It is, at least initially.

After character creation you’re dropped into a battle zone almost immediately, and from then on you’re left to your own devices.

Unfortunately this is perhaps our biggest criticism of the game. Very little is explained in PlanetSide 2, and for the first couple of hours you’ll find yourself fumbling around the menus and figuring out exactly what you need to be doing.

Each continent is separated into individual regions. It’s your job, as part of your chosen faction, to take control of key structures throughout the world and to push on through into enemy territory.

Battles can become really epic, a side effect of the scale of the game.

Smaller bases and outposts are simple enough to capture. A la Battlefield, it’s little more than a case of stepping into the capture point, defending your position until the bar converts to your colour and the job is done.

For larger, more important structures the tasks are a little more convoluted, however. You won’t be able to just march through the many forcefields protecting the buildings, first you’ll need to take out the generators powering them.

These are staged battlegrounds, requiring a sizeable attacking force and more than a little bit of teamwork to succeed; it makes it all the more fulfilling when one of these bases are captured.

But as we say, none of this is really explained. What are resources? Why do I need them? How do I level up and where do I get Cert Points? All questions you’ll have while playing, we expect.

If you stick with it, however, you’ll soon discover PlanetSide 2 provides a very unique approach to FPS combat. If the Battlefield series is a regiment of soldiers, PlanetSide 2 is an army.

It’s all in the preparation, and it’s here that the multiplayer aspect of PlanetSide 2 really stands out from the FPS crowd. It’s hard not to feel a sense of excitement as your faction begins to move out onto the planned enemy base.

Check out our first confused steps in PlanetSide 2.

And when you’re knuckled down with your allies in battle, you’ll almost certainly feel a sense of camaraderie. There’s a genuine feeling of gradual progress in attacking a base, like some kind of sci-fi World War I.

There are natural pockets of resistance where large armies converge, though these seem to appear dynamically. Maps are designed in such a way to offer interesting combat situations, but they’re so open it’d be impossible to create specific bottlenecks.

Yet as gorgeous as the three distinct continents of PlanetSide 2 are, they do lack a little depth. Design wise they’re great, with careful terrain design to create natural defences both for attackers and defenders; it’s the lack of impact each area has that has us most concerned.

Capturing a base or outlying post will earn your team an extra bonus, whether it’s additional resources or added vehicles such as regenerating health.

You don’t notice any of these, however, limiting the desire to capture a specific location because of the boon it’ll provide for your faction, just as there’s little reason to defend a station for the same reason.

Ultimately it’s all quite shallow, leaving armies to fight over terrain simply because it’s there to fight over.

The visuals really are quite impressive. You'll need a decent rig to join in properly.

This doesn’t stop PlanetSide 2 being fun to play, it just casts doubts over its longevity and whether it’s worth putting the time in to power up your character.

Cert Points are used to unlock abilities, weapons, upgrades and anything else you might need. Whether it’s for one of five character classes, weapon unlocks or vehicle enhancements it all comes out of this single pool of CP.

They’re earned – as we found out courtesy of the PlanetSide 2 wikia – either through individual medal challenges or a single Cert Point for every 250XP points earned. For reference, a single kill will earn you 100XP.

But while early class upgrades only cost between 30-50CP later ones can cost in the hundreds, while basic weapon unlocks will set you back 700CP. 

That’s a large chunk of points and will take hours and hours of play before you’ve earned that many, and even that relies on you actually being having a degree of skill with the game.

Of course you can fast track all this by purchasing Station Points with real money. We’re not going to claim it’s pay-to-win – we have no issue with such a system providing the options are there for everyone – it just seems unnecessarily obtrusive to a player’s experience.

Sticking together in a team is important. Solo players will not last long.

Call Of Duty and Battlefield prove that if you want to keep players hooked you need to drip-feed them rewards, however minor, and this set up just turns PlanetSide 2 into an unnecessary grind.

It’s early days for the MMO, however, and no doubt tweaks and alterations will be incoming. There’s a lot of promise in PlanetSide 2 and at its very basic – in other words pointing guns at people and shooting – it’s extremely well made and highly enjoyable.

Most MMOs have a progression of sorts, but even if your faction overwhelms a continent – which isn’t uncommon – it simply resets to begin anew again. It’s telling that, when defending a location, it always feels like you’re battling against a stalemate.

The thrill in PlanetSide 2 is in attacking where you can see the progress that is being made. When defending it’s unrelenting – true of real war, we’d expect – but when there’s no real reason to stick around, often it’s best just to leave the enemy to it and return to recapture a little while later. And that’s a shame.

Before you read the review of Football Manager 2013, why not read our exclusive interview with Sports Interactive's studio head, Miles Jacobson.

It’s genuinely getting to the point where reviewing Football Manager 2013 is difficult, because we want to love it but it’s just so similar to what came last year. If only the folks at Sports Interactive would pull their thumbs out and… just a second… Ah.

So Football Manager 2013 does actually add a whole new couple of modes to the game as well as making multiplayer better than it ever has been in the series (though admittedly still not a focus). Seems our pre-prepared stock intro won’t fly here. Damn.

Classic mode is the big new addition, made for the very developers who created the game because they don’t have the time to play it anymore. Oh, the public with no time too – it’s not a totally selfish creation. It’s a stripped-back version of the traditional Football Manager experience: less complex than the main simulation mode, but offering a great deal more than the Handheld spin-off does. The closest lazy comparison we can come up with is that it’s like Championship Manager 01/02, but more complex.

Gone are press conferences, avoided are teamtalks, messing about with minutiae is a Thing You Don’t Do and, if you don’t care to sit through them, you can get instant match results too. Yet somehow, some way, you still feel like you’re getting a solid, full management game.

Alright, we said graphically it’s improved, but if you weren’t impressed before… sorry.

There are areas you might lament not having much control – we do enjoy berating our team at half time, after all – but generally speaking it’s a well-made and, importantly, fun new way to play Football Manager.

Challenge mode is something imported from the Handheld version, and something we’ve also chatted about in previous coverage. For those who missed it: it’s a mode where you take on a game over a set period and have to abide by certain stipulations – your team is all injured, you’re in a relegation battle and so on – and overcome the challenge. Do you see what we did there?

It’s surprising how well it fits in the whole experience, offering a bit of a getaway from the other two, more involved modes. While its natural home sits on the portable, handheld devices of iPhones, Android devices and PSPs, it’s still good to see the extra bit of fun included in the game.

It’s important to lavish praise on the simulation mode of FM2013 (we’d call it ‘the classic’ mode, but that would just get confusing) in an obligatory paragraph or few, so let’s do that: there are smaller improvements across the board for the meatier attraction.

A more important role for directors of football (along with the manager’s ability to hire and fire them), a more refined scouting system, modified training systems (again), better prompts to get you gaming the media system (insulting Alan Pardew, mainly) and new financial stipulations – as well as region-specific tax rates – are just a few of the much-vaunted ‘more than 900’ changes made.

What it leads to is one of those experiences that feels that little bit different to last time around, just like FM2012 did, like FM2011 did before that and so on and so forth. A few graphical flourishes and a better match engine make for a more visually appealing spectacle too, and it’s not often you can say that about Football Manager.

Classic mode goes some way to encouraging those put off by the game’s complexity to give it a try. Go on, you might like it.

Simulation mode is the only part where we start to lose some of the boundless enthusiasm built up through playing Classic and Challenge modes. Maybe it’s just the fact we were going back to a tried and tested mode rather than something fresh and exciting, or maybe it’s just because – for all its quality – Football Manager works better in the stripped-back, Classic mode.

Maybe, maybe, maybe. For the time being, it’s good to know there’s the choice in a single package. If you want a quick(er) blast through a dozen seasons trying to drag Rotherham into the same division as traitorous striker Adam Le Fondre, you can do so in Classic mode.

If you fancy putting half of your life into the meticulous, engrossing management of Malmo as you turn them into a European force to be reckoned with, stick with the original simulation and you’ll be more than happy.

We didn’t expect big changes from Football Manager 2013, but we’ve been left spoilt with the riches bestowed upon us. It’s the best version of the game yet, no doubt about it.

You shoot things, and then you shoot things, and then you shoot things, and then you shoot things.

That’s the entire ethos of Painkiller: Hell & Damnation summed up in a simple, clumsy but endearing opening sentence. Because Painkiller: Hell & Damnation is a simple, clumsy but endearing game.

It’s refreshingly simple from start to end. You begin in a cemetery with a Soulcatcher and a shotgun, shooting skeletons as they charge you after clambering out of nearby graves.

This sets the tone early. You can skip the tutorial, the story is little more than a quick explanation as to why you’re in a graveyard and there are no awkward game mechanics to wrestle with. Enemies rush at you and you’re forced into backing off, firing manically at the surging crowd, occasionally daring to sprint forward and past them as you sense the safe space behind you is running out.

It’s telling that the most important control here is the key to run backwards.

Even when new enemies are introduced, they don’t knock Painkiller off its shoot-everything-really-fast-while-running-backwards focus. If you’re up against a shielded knight, you need to shoot at his feet or wait for a wild sword swing before letting rip. Floating axe-wielding creatures sway left and right as they spill towards you, demanding accuracy temporarily replaces mashing-the-trigger in your skillset.



The fast pace of Painkiller: Hell & Damnation means the main skill to survive is quickly learning and adjusting to your surroundings. You need to quickly move around tight arenas cluttered with obstacles to avoid being overwhelmed by enemy numbers, all the while keeping an eye on new threats suddenly appearing from unexpected directions and keeping another eye on your dwindling ammo count.

This makes it sound like your eyes are rolling around in your head independently of each other like a chameleon but it’s surprisingly instinctive, as ultimately you’re trying to survive, and there aren’t any complex game mechanics to get in the way of that. The only real flourish is that you can capture souls with your Soulcatcher weapon, which throws you into an invulnerable demon state when you’ve nabbed 66 of them. It’s a little too fiddly to bother with when there’s so much emphasis on simply surviving, so it’ll mostly be discarded because you’ll rarely find the room in battle to incorporate it.

But then maybe that’s the point. This is Ye Olde FPS Gaming 101, with only Serious Sam helping carry the torch nowadays for this style of shooter. This won’t be news to you if you played Painkiller when it first did the rounds in 2004. This Hell & Damnation edition plucks levels from the original outing and its expansion packs and recreates them with glossy HD, keeping the spirit of the frantic shooter remains intact. Yet while it has a nostalgic kick to it, it also straddles a fine line between relentless and exhausting.

The best moments are the unexpected touches that demand a level of improvisation, when new enemies are dropped on top of you and you have to quickly think on your feet. Conversely, when the set-up is particularly obvious – the huge, empty room sprawled out before you just after you pick up ammo placed right on your path – you end up reluctantly ragging yourself into the arena rather than charging into it.

There are only two things that break up the pattern of fending off tidal waves of enemies. Boss battles are the obvious one, though they’re not the huge change of pace that Painkiller sometimes needs. Bosses are big, slow targets with health bars that you need to constantly chip away at, while their attacks are much harder to avoid than the usual cannon fodder. But initial worry in how you’ll tackle the behemoths subsides as you realise the same tactic that’s served you well elsewhere sees you safely past bosses – you’re still wheeling around the arena in huge strafing circles and you’re still emptying whatever ammo you have left in their direction.

The other change of pace comes from exploration. There are secret areas to uncover, with extra health items, ammo and armour tucked away in the each level. They’re not particularly hard to find if you’re prepared to poke and prod at the corners of each map and on harder difficulties, when the challenge is really cranked up, they’re borderline essential to progress. Yet on default difficulty, Painkiller is relying on you to be motivated enough to seek these items out and explore. In truth, it’s unlikely you’ll bother.

Multiplayer also adheres to FPS games of days gone by. Bunny-hopping is an essential skill, as is memorising where the armour and weapon pick-ups are. It’s crude in a way we haven’t seen in a long, long time – you can almost see the building blocks used to put the maps together – but then the appeal here is that it’s old school, a throwback to the days of Quake III Arena et al.

It’s a distinct style of multiplayer, with the map design good enough and the weapons interesting enough that at the very least you’ll get some enjoyment out of a quick multiplayer blast. Whether it has the balance and the community to sustain it is something that will be answered in the months ahead rather than now.

It’s good to have Painkiller: Hell & Damnation around, if only because the FPS genre offers so much more than military dudebro romps. Health doesn’t recharge, there are no killstreak rewards and there’s no cover to duck behind. It’s a game where you have an endless charge of enemies and a ridiculous array of weapons to take them out with.

This is a game where you shoot things. No more, no less.

Version Tested: PC

After only a short amount of time with Hotline Miami you’ll come to the realisation that Dennaton Games’ top-down, self-proclaimed ‘f*ck-‘em-up’ is one of the most brutal games of 2012.

You may find it hard to believe that a pixelated indie game could compete with the likes of Resident Evil 6, Hitman Absolution or Assassin’s Creed 3 in the violence stakes, but the developers have squeezed every last possible bit of expression from their limited resolution. The claret spurts, bodies are dismembered and enemies executed in ways wide-ranging enough to make us go queasy just thinking about it, but there’s more to Hotline Miami’s sleazy action than simply GTA-inspired uber-violence which makes the game so compelling.

At first glance, Hotline Miami comes across as a walk-‘em-up which looks and feels like Vice City - if Rockstar had made it with the original GTA engine. The action is zoomed in on our unnamed protagonist who walks around each level’s mazy interiors, while interacting with a limited number of objects and a high number of weapons.

Each stage’s objective is simple: kill each and every thug wondering the building in any way possible. Attacks range from basic punches, to increasingly damaging melee attacks using whatever weapons and objects you find around; there are various guns too, but their limited ammo and loudness make using them something of a risky prospect.

Despite looking like a top down shooter in the vein of Alien Breed however, players will need to apply the sort of cautious strategic thinking more closely associated with Mode 7’s brilliant Frozen Synapse.

A level will generally play out something like this: You walk into the building and identify who you’ll take out first. You slam the first door open, timing it perfectly so that you know the first thug to the ground. He’s only stunned though, so you jump on him and finish the job with few hits. Then it’s off down the corridor to hide just as someone comes around the corner. You take him out with the knife/lead pipe/two-by-four you just acquired, then attempt to rush the two guys in the next room. One of them shoots you dead. So you hit ‘restart’ and you walk into the building…



In many ways, Hotline Miami is the next Super Meat Boy/Trials Evolution or any other title which requires obscene use of the restart button – every one of its tricky 20  levels provides a compulsive reason to continue, and although you will experience hair-tearingly frustrating moments, they’re normally of your own making, whether poor planning, a mistimed action, or trial and error with a new environmental element, such as windows or walls that can be seen/shot through.

Even though this is a bloody, close-quarters realtime action game, strategy counts for a lot, with line of sight and weapon choice proving just as vital as your reflexes. Guns can’t be reloaded, so stockpiling weapons in one room, or hiding around a corner for an onslaught of approaching enemies are other valid tactics. Enemies follow Metal Gear-style paths, but Dennaton throws in the occasional random-seeming decision to ensure no two play-throughs are identical.

Hotline Miami’s tense action is dripping with presentational style of anunusually high concentration, but never so much that it feels more significant than the gameplay substance, as was the case in Retro City Rampage. The music, reminiscent of recent Hollywood throwback Drive, is full of electro-pop and thumping club tunes which creates the perfect atmosphere and is almost worth the price of admission alone. The vague but edgy story and interactive interludes add to the mood, while unlockable weapons, boss fights, various ability-boosting masks and a range of completion grades, encourage creativity and replayability.

Niggles include the sometimes-fiddly controls when playing with keyboard and mouse, especially when moving quickly or in tight corners, but careful planning usually results in a workable scenario. Elsewhere, enemies respond to the sound of your gunshots, but not those fired by other henchmen – a minor discrepancy in order to keep the game playable we guess.

Hubris sets in after around 20 hours of XCOM: Enemy Unknown. We thought we saw the worst the aliens could throw at us, that the best of our veteran soldiers were invincible, and, worse, it occurred to us that this was Firaxis in 2012, not MicroProse 1994.

Reboot or not, we just couldn’t imagine that the Civilization 5 developer would make a turn-based strategy game as cruel or as punishing as a hardcore mid-Nineties PC classic.

So like every proud empire, our fall was hard, delivered by successive waves of Mutons, armoured Floaters, Cyberdiscs, and their kin as the aliens turned their efforts to taking advantage of our poor research choices and inefficient use of government funding, overwhelming every squad we could throw at them and pushing mankind into oblivion… and we saw that it was good.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown is hard then, as long as you want it to be. Stick the ‘Ironman’ option on (one save only, no option to leave the game without saving first), play on the classic difficulty setting and be warned: XCOM veterans will be faced with increasingly tough challenges.

The only reason we didn’t play the crushingly difficult top tier was because we remember Superhuman mode in the original and we don’t want to end up crying again.

Most attacks and actions see the camera pan out to give the best view of the conflict, with some sweet cinematic angles for the best shots.

Superficially it could be a totally different game. There are still three parts to XCOM – the base, the geoscape and the tactical screen – but the single base you control has taken an ‘ant farm’ perspective, the geoscape bears some resemblance to the original, and missions could easily be an entirely new strategy game, thanks to Unreal Engine 3.

Firaxis has also been playing with the XCOM formula, taking some ingredients out and adding others like a baker trying make a classic fruit cake their own.

Multiple bases are gone, replaced with a single base and a satellite grid; time units are have been swapped out for a simper double-turn system; procedurally generated terrain has been replaced with a set number of maps; and large squads have been reduced to a six-man team. It sounds like a nightmare of dumbing down. But it’s not.

In XCOM’s defence, squeezing your resources in this way has made it a more interesting game. There’s no expanding into other territories with multiple bases if you live to regret your choice of layout, the limited squad size means you’re more protective about your team, set maps mean tactically interesting terrain, and the locations are so numerous anyway that you can play through again without seeing the same one twice. And time units? You won’t miss those.

Higher ranked soldiers will also have additional abilities to make them harder. Just one more reason to lament their death.

You can’t kneel or go prone for a better shot, but cover is attributed a simple binary value (half or full cover) and you can ‘hunker down’ behind it for an even bigger defensive bonus.

There’s no ammunition, though you do need to reload, and no inventory, so most soldiers can only carry one main weapon and one backpack item like a medkit or frag grenade.

Many aspects of XCOM have been stripped down, simplified, and as a result you spend only a little time deliberating over kit or budgeting for your next move, and more time in the field, deciding the tactics that you hope will keep your team alive.

On Classic mode that’s a tough ask, because the game escalates fast. The aliens nearly always seem one step ahead; the respite you get when plasma rifles have been researched, your men get the protection they need from Titan armour, or your interceptors are finally a match for alien vessels is brief enough to be rewarding before the ante is upped.

Veterans will have an idea of what they’re facing and the challenges to come, but you’re still not prepared for your first encounter with a Cyberdisc or the alien ship that you discover is full of Mutons.

The UI on PC includes a lot more information for those who need it.

We’re cool with the fixed maps and even the way your squad starts outside the dropship, but the maps tend to be quite linear and the Skyranger always sets down at the edge of the map, so you already have a good idea of the direction the aliens are in – there are never any surprises waiting in the dark for you when you land.

The aliens only seem to be ‘triggered’ in batches whenever they come into sight, so once you’ve cleared a batch and as long as no one can see an alien, your men have all the time in the world to regroup and recover with no fear of an enemy advance.

Both of these things take some of the unknown out of it; there was nothing quite like making that tentative walk off the Skyranger into the unknown, or the terror of exploring an alien base in the knowledge that Chryssalids and Mutons could burst through the room at the end of your turn.

Yet here we are, nearly 48 hours of playtime later, the end nowhere in sight, and enjoying XCOM: Enemy Unknown even more than we did at the beginning.

It’s hard for any World Of Warcraft: Mists Of Pandaria review to avoid the inevitable split-argument.

On one hand, it’s only an expansion pack and we should judge it as such: how much content, what are the improvements and new features like and – most importantly – is it fun?

But alternatively it’s an extension to a multiple-years old MMO, with all the stipulations and consternation that come with its age. And man does it show.

But first, the Mists Of Pandaria content. With a brand new starting area, a whole new continent (and raised level cap to accompany it), a brand new race and class and the various dungeon and raid content that you’d expect.

There’s no denying the value of Mists Of Pandaria: if you’re already invested in the World Of Warcraft then you’ve got plenty new to see, do and kill. And we’d have it no other way.

The Pandaren race takes centre stage here, as you might expect, and bring with them a wealth of gorgeous visuals, unique characters and an entertaining shift in culture.

It’s a tangible change, too. The Chinese aesthetic really feels different to the usual WoW content, and provides enough new and fresh that even grizzled veterans of Blizzard’s opus will find it hard not to be dazzled.

This is how Mists Of Pandaria begins. Forget flying around Pandaria, though.

The story surrounding Mists Of Pandaria is unusually deep too. The eternal battle between Horde and Alliance once more takes precedent, albeit if only to spawn a greater threat in the form of the mystical Sha – a force of nature that embodies our negative emotions.

Hatred, anger, vengeance: all names of Sha entities that the arrival of the warmongering Alliance and Horde races inflict on the generally peaceful race of Pandaren.

This mistrust of the ‘strangers from beyond the mist’ is a theme common throughout the PvE content of Mists Of Pandaria and – with more cut-scenes than WoW has ever been treated to – it is very ably told.

There’s a reason to invest in the tale this time, which is a must when the likes of Guild Wars 2, The Secret World and even Star Wars: The Old Republic are shaking up the MMO market.

That doesn’t mean Mists Of Pandaria isn’t without the same old problems, however. Its questing still relies heavily on the filler content and, regardless of how much it ties in to the story of the expansion, you’re still just hunting animals for meat without any real reason.

Honestly, by now you’re probably the greatest hero Azeroth has ever seen: dragons have been slain, entire alternate realms have been conquered and even the end of the world has been halted. Almost solely by your hand.

The pet battles - while throwaway - are good fun and a great distraction.

So why on earth are you willing to head out and kill yak so a dwarf warrior can eat? Why is he so incapable of doing that himself? Shouldn't you have someone to do that shit for you?

There are moments where this monotony lets up, and it’s here that Mists Of Pandaria really excels. Quests that are a little more inventive than the usual generic fodder are far more common this time around.

Whether it’s collecting yak to drive through the yakwash, hopping in a gyrocopter to bombard your enemies below or defeating your mirror image to prove your worth to a giant talking wolf, there’s just as much to enjoy about Mists Of Pandaria as there is to dismiss.

Best of all are the dungeons, which are as varied as they are entertaining. Stormstout Brewery, the earliest of the bunch, highlights Blizzard’s ability at injecting humour into its dungeons, while Mogu’shan Palace proves it can craft interesting boss battles.

There are other changes, of course. The Monk class is a jack-of-all-trades and yet a master of all. Already it's being called out as overpowered, perhaps even more so than Death Knights, which doesn’t bode well for the inevitable nerfing.

But they’re still a fun class to play as, acting in many ways like a hybrid between classic warrior and rogue styles of play. And the animation is so silky smooth it is hard not to enjoy battling through to 90.

There's plenty of different locales. It might not look like much, but The Jade Forest is one of the more colourful.

The reworked talent system isn’t very good though, we’ll say that outright. Maybe it’s our aged-minds resisting change, but the simplicity of the system seems like an unnecessary attempt to streamline World Of Warcraft further.

By having only one ability to choose every 15 levels the wait seems a little unfair, especially since it doesn’t really offer any more personal control over character development – as Blizzard had explained it – than the old system.

And this is kind of testament to World Of Warcraft as a whole. It’s very much an MMO of its time that, for all its flaws and incessant grinding, had something of a personality to it.

It was Warcraft 3 in third-person, tying into the story of the Scourge and the undead plague with real depth. The more expansion packs we see, the further from the original vision World Of Warcraft becomes.

That, in itself, has both negative and positive connotations. Yes it improves the game with every new release, but that original vision becomes more and more diluted.

With Mists Of Pandaria the content is fantastic; a healthy blend of new and old with many of the improvements and changes that World Of Warcraft desperately needs.

But on the other hand Mists Of Pandaria feels restricted by the mechanics that tie it all together. As more and more elements are brought in, those classic mechanics start to feel older.

The Pandaren are a unique race, and bring that over into the quests of Mists Of Pandaria.

There are elements that are new – pet battles, inventive quests, Pandaria as a whole – and all of it is really well done, but the sad truth is that it still feels as though concessions have been made to make them work in an archaic system.

If anyone has the quality to reinvent its own MMO all over again it’s Blizzard and, as great as Mists Of Pandaria is, it doesn’t change enough to bring back all those fans who once adored the World Of Warcraft.

Which brings us right back to the original conundrum: is this a good expansion pack or a prolonging of World Of Warcraft?

Ultimately, if you still enjoy WoW - and why shouldn't you, it's still a very well made MMO - then this is a certain upgrade for you.

But if you have since moved on, perhaps to Guild Wars 2 or The Secret World, then Mists Of Pandaria does not offer enough new to rectify those complaints you had when you left.

WoW: Mists of Pandaria Review in Progress

• Meet Brian
• Gotta Catch ‘Em All
• Feeling Old
• Into The Mists
• A Question Of Questing
• One Week In

Loot. It’s long become a staple of the action RPG, but recently it appears to be everywhere in videogames.

Borderlands 2 has turned the acquisition of things that go bang and boom into an art form, Darksiders II had an unhealthy obsession with collecting ever more outlandish weaponry, while Krater was just… Well, it was rubbish.

It’s arguably Blizzard’s Diablo III that has set the current standard for loot-drop games, however, delivering a polished experience that has turned grinding and endless loot cycling into a higher purpose for millions of gamers.

So surely, with Blizzard’s game still turning heads there’s little room in the action RPG genre for another upstart? Runic Games would beg to differ, and after more hours than we can care to remember, we do too. Torchlight II not only successfully builds on its enjoyable 2009 predecessor but takes the franchise in all manner of exciting new directions.

While Torchlight was a bunch of former Diablo developers cautiously testing out new ideas, its sequel is bold, brash and fully confident in its ability to take an established genre in interesting new directions. The most obvious of these is Torchlight II’s  ability to finally let you adventure with a party of other players, either online or via LAN.

While it initially suffered from numerous matchmaking issues, games for the most part are stable and a hell of a lot of fun. It can certainly get hectic when six players are all scrapping away at the same time, but it never descends into outright chaos.

For a budget price, Torchlight 2 creates a surprisingly pretty world.

Runic should also be commended for ensuring that players receive their own loot while playing together, meaning players should be able to team up with total strangers without the fear of having their goodies stolen.

While there’s nothing to compete with Blizzard’s online auction house, the entire system is extremely robust, and in the weeks since Torchlight II’s launch, we’ve never had problem playing online. The real beauty of Torchlight II is that as good as cracking skulls with friends is, the game is just as satisfying when playing on your own.

This is largely down to Runic’s experience within the field, as well as your ever-present pet, who has been significantly enhanced since the original game, fighting more intelligently than before. It’s also possible to give them a shopping list of useful items, saving you a trip. One interesting aspect of Runic’s sequel is that none of the character classes from the original game return.

Instead you now have four new classes to get to grip with: Engineer, Outlander, Embermage and Berserker. The Engineer is a multipurpose fighter, able to  mix heavy weaponry with the ability to create a number of useful constructs, while the Outlander relies on speed and ranged attacks and dabbles with magic.

The Berserker takes on the role of tank, and has access to all manner of heavy duty weaponry and the ability to summon animal spirits, with the Embernage excelling at flinging spells and specialising in elemental magic. All four characters have three distinct skill trees, meaning that Torchlight II offers a satisfying amount of customisation, as well as an extremely generous level cap that takes you all the way to level 100.

While  the included skills and attributes don’t feel as well-balanced as those in Diablo III, they nevertheless allow you to take your characters in all sorts of exciting directions, as you work out what best for your current style of play.

It’s worth noting, though, that you’re pretty much locked on the paths you choose, and although it is possible to reselect the last three chosen skills for a price, the skill tress lack the flexibility of Diablo III. For the most part, many will not care, as the sheer breadth and variety on offer in Torchlight II is genuinely pleasing.

Love loot? The you'll love this. It's that simple.

The ever-deepening mine of the original game has been replaced with a variety of exotic, randomly designed locations. New weather and night and day effects add to the variety, while Torchlight’s distinctive-looking world scales beautifully, regardless of your system.

It’s not graphics-hungry by any means, but the distinctive art style and beautifully designed enemies will have you constantly zooming in with your mouse wheel so you can better savour the distinctive and exciting world that was first hinted at in Torchlight.

Yes, it can be argued that Torchlight II adds little to the genre, and yes, it feels a little rough around the edges compared to Blizzard’s super-slick loot-conquering behemoth, but it remains an impressive achievement in itself, and is a massive improvement over the original game.

Quests are better structured and there are plenty of nice little touches like being able to turn off low-level loot – handy on later playthroughs when you want to avoid worthless junk – while the combat remains meaty and endlessly satisfying. It’s also a keeper, offering plenty of replay value via new game  restarts, and that’s without fully exploring each distinct class.

It’s something of a shame, then, that Torchlight’s story rarely digs into you in the same way that its combat and customisation does. While it ties in with events from the original game, it’s a largely bland affair, filled with predictable moments and stereotypical characters.

It’s an admittedly weak link in an otherwise strong chain, though, and proves that you don’t need to be a multimillion-dollar colossus in order to make a memorable impact on a well-trodden genre.

FTL arrives as one of the first of the Kickstarter boom generation of games, though admittedly it had something of an advantage over many other fan-funded titles on show.

Mainly that it already existed before the folks at Subset games asked for $10,000 to help finish it (and were given $200,000 instead).

But it’s here, it’s available, if you funded it you’ve had your copy for a couple of weeks now and if you didn’t fund it then: a) you poor fool, and b) buy it from Steam or GOG.com. Immediately.

Ostensibly a spaceship-management simulator, FTL sees players hurtling across a randomised galaxy in order to deliver the warning of an impending attack.

Along the way you will get into scrapes, encounters, meet strange new lifeforms and meekly go where some others have gone before. It might initially be ‘boldly’, but FTL will soon smack that confidence out of you.

This is a difficult game – but it’s one where you learn to embrace failure; where every cock-up on your part is a harsh lesson, and every hilariously imbalanced encounter a test of your fire-management and running away skills.

The meat of FTL is its ship-to-ship combat. Held in real time, players can pause the game at any point to issue orders when things are getting a bit too hectic to take in.

 “Umm... guys – the room that lets us breathe is on fire...”

Pause, target their weapons with your multi-firing lasers, hope it’s enough to break through the shields, unpause, see what happens. (Pause, wonder how so many rooms caught fire without you noticing, unpause, realise automatic door control is offline, can’t shut the airlocks you opened, half the crew chokes to death.)

It’s doesn’t require deep strategy to defeat many opponents, just a mix of clever weapons use and paying attention to what you’re targeting. But just as you think things are going swimmingly, something will go wrong: then you panic.

Then you have to think. Then you’ll make mistakes. It’s exhilarating at its best, and it hits its best more often than you might think for a crowdfunded rogue-like indie game about spachships.

If you’ve an aversion to relying on chance, instead demanding specific mechanics are in place to ensure you have a fighting chance, you may get annoyed by FTL.

But then, that’s asking the game to be something it isn’t: inherently fair.

For every time we ended up with a quick-firing ion laser in the first sector, capable of decimating our opponent’s defences and allowing a relatively simple journey to the final boss (against which we inevitably died), we saw a run where two of our starting three crew were killed for no good reason and little more than the initial, weak laser was offered up as resistance to the countless aggressors encountered along the way.

But that’s the fun. That’s why it’s intense. That’s why FTL is – surprisingly – a game that fits firmly alongside other fist-pump-inducing titles.

The joy of spanking a 35-yard screamer into the top corner on PES 2013 is matched by the intense relief of asphyxiating those invading Mantis bastards while at the same time finally getting a direct missile hit to finish their ship off.

There’s no guarantee it’s going to happen; there’s no guarantee it isn’t going to happen, but whatever happens (or doesn’t) you’ll want to start over straight away and see what might (or might not) happen next time. FTL is a game about stories.

Upgrades are necessary and not-at-all plentiful. Plan ahead.

Everyone who plays it will have at least one interesting tale to tell – one yarn of the heroic engineer who managed, somehow, to repair the ship’s oxygen production system before the crew succumbed to a lack of air.

One tale of the lone human crewmember who single-handedly fought off two Mantis aggressors through clever use of the med-bay.

An anecdote of how they created an unstoppable war machine of a ship, tearing through any opponents that dared to face them before reaching the final sector, facing off against the last boss and immediately running out of missiles, rendering the entire plan of attack neutered, the ship’s ability to cause damage now gone.

That last one, particularly, hurts. For a few quid you can buy into all of these stories and more. FTL has proved itself worth far more than the $200,000 it raised on Kickstarter, and it’s something we’d be happy to pay a lot more than £7 for.

Get involved; spool ‘em up; watch your crew die horribly in a fire you should have noticed.

How can you review Black Mesa? As a free downloadable mod of Valve’s original Half-Life, it seems a bit redundant. You could just download it for yourself and find out, after all.

But then this is clearly a very important point in the video game industry. Black Mesa – as a project – began many moons ago, way before the current trend of slapping ‘HD’ on a box and reselling something that came out a couple of years ago.

In the face of these HD remakes, Black Mesa is something of a revelation. But then that’s because there’s no money behind it: this is a selection of fans that either have a serious love for Half-Life or are applying to work at Valve in the most arduous way possible.

Black Mesa is more than just Half-Life in the 2007 Source engine. Real care and attention has gone into making this the ultimate Half-Life remake, and it shows from the instant you click ‘New Game’.

The famous opening of Half-Life has had a huge reworking. The mechanics are still the same: you’ll travel through different distinct areas (each of which parallel the varying locations of the full game), you’ll meet and greet fellow scientists, you’ll suit-up in your Hazard gear and then you’ll cause a resonance cascade.

Just a normal day at the office, really.

But while the events are the same, Black Mesa’s attention to detail is still just as fascinating, resulting in a weird mix of nostalgia and novelty.

Everyone remembers this 'boss' fight.

Take that famous tram ride, for example. The same recognisable locations are there: the security guard banging on the door, the helicopter preparing for takeoff in the canyon area or the mech marching through radioactive waste.

But here they’re tweaked and improved. The mech now features a pair of scientists struggling to free themselves from the area; a subtle change, perhaps, but adds narrative weight to the tram ride in a fashion that only Valve itself would match.

This continues, as well. Entering Sector C Anomalous Materials now features a glass panel, with a new guard passing judgment on Gordon Freeman’s apparent loss of a ponytail.

It’s new, it’s funny, but most of all it leaves you questioning whether or not it was the original. It’s not, of course, there was no window in the 1998 version, but the fact that it feels as part of the series is a testament to the quality the Black Mesa team has put into this game.

This same attention to detail filters throughout Black Mesa. Old areas have been recreated with increased detail and better visuals, the Source 2007 engine doing a fantastic job of modernising the game.

Sometimes liberties may have been taken, adding in new corridors or rooms – even altering areas entirely – but it’s always complimentary to the original.

Some areas have been recreated entirely, gameplay elements included.

In some cases completely new areas have been included, whether it’s physics-based puzzles or additional platforming opportunities. And again, it’s an improvement.

The Source engine brings much more than just fancier lighting models and improved models, too. As a physics-led engine, it’s a given that new opportunities arise throughout.

Gears must be placed into their necessary sockets to make a pulley system work, flares can be used to set headcrab zombies on fire or turrets can be replaced for personal defence.

Everything about Black Mesa has been considered, reworked if necessary and given a visual overhaul when it isn’t.

As such this is an opportunity to replay one of the most important first-person shooters in videogame history. Yet still, bizarrely, Black Mesa will manage to feel fresh and new.

With new outstanding sound-alike voice acting, in-game achievements and a superb soundtrack from Joel Nielsen it almost feels like theft to play this game for free – because if you’re enjoying something for free it’s obviously piracy, right?

But if all classic games were given this level of love and devotion then we’d never need to play a new game again. It’ll be an injustice if the Black Mesa team isn’t gobbled up by Valve.

Hindsight is a bittersweet thing in war when you can respawn an unlimited number of times after death.

We’ve just been given several short, poignant lessons in the best places to defend the Shearwater 51 oil rig map when under attack, yet we’ve still got a lot to learn.

To paraphrase another upcoming Ubisoft title, the definition of insanity is to do same thing over and over again and expect different results, which makes us pretty mental. But then, having been humiliated by a marksman on the defending team and this being free-to-play, we’re not losing anything by stubbornly throwing our specialist down that corridor of doom, time and time again.

Hopefully his repeated death will buy some time for the rest of the team to capture the next point. Ghost Recon Online is a lightweight, third-person online cover shooter that would qualify as the online portion of an expansive single-player game, or a full-price XBLA title, which is the price we would normally expect to pay for a fairly hardcore game of this type.

Only it’s completely free to download and play, which we suspect will make GRO a real draw for a PC gaming community that, in recent years, has had its online toys snatched away from it and either given to consoles or monetised by increasingly corporate publishers. 

Ubisoft has managed to produce visuals that put a lot of free-to-play games to shame.

Free-to-play doesn’t mean that every thing is free in GRO, naturally; there are the microtransactions we’ve come to know, and they’re not so ‘micro’ in this case. Ghost Coins can be bought in bundles for around fiver upwards, rather like buying Microsoft Points for your Xbox Live account, enabling you to furnish a soldier with extra kit and bonuses.

These can be also be bought with Requisition Points, which can be earned by simply playing and completing games. Like any MMO, Ghost Coins simply give those with the finances but not the time a chance to buy their progression with real money. “No fair!” you cry?

Well, to those with jobs, responsibilities and lives, having all the time in the world to practice a map and earn oodles of RPs while you’re on your summer holidays isn’t fair either. Perhaps you should relish the more level playing field this system potentially offers.

Besides, it’s not as if a bank balance loaded with GCs has made our account imbalanced, as there’s still a learning curve to get through even if it is an extremely rapid one. GRO is pretty simple in terms of its pure shooting mechanics and online gaming functions.

A team of ghosts is pitched against a team of Splinter Cell Conviction’s Megiddo in what currently consists of two different online modes: Conquest, which is a tug-of-war for territory against the clock, the object of the defending team being to prevent the attackers from taking too many control points before the timer expires; and Onslaught, in which the attackers must advance their position to take objectives A, B and C.

Classes are equally simple: the specialist deals in shotgun and light machine gun support, the dreaded recon guy pops skulls with a sniper rifle from range, and the assault soldier, with standard issue automatic rifles, takes up the mid-range.

Each class has abilities associated with it, so the recon class has active camouflage and Oracle, which is a kind of radar that works a bit like the Farsight gun in Perfect Dark – useful when acting alone, but with efficient team communication, lets the team keep tabs on enemy movements.

Team play and tactics are still the focus for Ghost Recon Online.

Assault has a TS3B shield that gives added protection and allows the soldier to knock his opponent down, plus one of our favourite abilities in GRO, the HEAT device, which injures and renders enemies within a certain area temporarily incapable of combat in a rippling blue wave of energy.

Specialists have the equivalent of the HEAT that cripples technologies rather than people in the Aegis, a kind of god mode that bends bullets away from your body while active. Running and gunning is rarely advisable in GRO, but with Aegis activated, it’s the best way to play.

All six of these can be upgraded as your soldiers level up, gaining experience with each kill and each map completed, regardless of whether your performance as the part of the team was exemplary or not. That’s the great thing about GRO: as long as you’re playing, you’re progressing.

Experience and requisition points will come quicker to prolific killers and performers, but with daily missions and achievements to unlock, even horrible players can muster a few levels in a couple of hours while scraping together enough RPs to upgrade a soldier and focus on getting the hang of at least one of the classes.

This is a cinch to get into, especially for those who like to nip into shooters as a break from MMOs – you’ll be perfectly at home with both the micropayment system and cover shooter mechanics.

GRO is probably the kind of no-frills, zero dedication shooter accessible to everyone that will appeal to you, as its free-to-play structure and competitive quality means there will always be a match for you to dip into, no matter what the time of day is.

If we have to pick at something, it’s the fact that you’re locked into your class once you start a game, which means that a team might well have doomed themselves before they’ve even started the game, depending on the map and the opposition.

It’s also pretty basic as far as today’s online shooters are concerned, but you have to tell yourself, this is free. And even in the face of other free-to-play competition, that’s pretty good value for money.

The fantasy based MMO has always been plagued by a subtle irony.

The genre is trying to live up to some grandiose ideals, to both immerse players in Tolkien-inspired high fantasy and deliver living gaming worlds for hundreds of players, but all too often their rigid mechanics, based around prolonging the experience to justify a subscription, rob them of that magic, especially for anyone outside the MMO community.

Its tends to divide gamers into either MMO fans or those who won’t go near them, but in Guild Wars 2 ArenaNet has tried to evolve its non-subscription MMO to better appeal to everyone.

While Guild Wars 2 isn’t perfect, a fusing of generous content and greater accessibility has resulted in one of the most welcoming and absorbing games in years, especially for newcomers to the genre.

Unlike most MMOs, which stack ‘premium’ content like massive monster fights in their endgame, Guild Wars 2 sprinkles it liberally throughout the world of Tyria.

For starters, each of GW2’s five races – the struggling Humans, Viking-like Norn, diminutive but technically brilliant Asura, warlike feline Charr and graceful sentient plant race the Sylvari – have starting quests sporting impressive large-scale confrontations of the sort you’d only expect at high levels in most MMOs.

It’s isn’t the only difference, as GW2’s quest system eschews quest logs or givers; missions are represented by hearts on the vast map and triggered simply by approaching them, with a progress bar keeping you appraised as to completion.

It works because of the huge variety of quests with multiple objectives on offer, from fighting bandits to exploring undersea villages or gathering special items – one of our quirky favourites saw us transformed into a pig and searching for truffles.

The grind isn’t entirely gone, but it’s been effectively hidden. Rather than slowly dribbling out content, GW2 encourages exploration by a waypoint system allowing fast travel to any areas you’re uncovered for quests, and XP is given for everything, including exploration.

Even better, you’re never lone-wolf questing, with players all around doing the same tasks and helping in combat. GW2’s open design means XP is shared, and while they’re fairly traditional, a generous mix of objectives and how you organically co-operate makes them far more engaging.

Are you ready to dive into another sprawling MMO? Oh, go on then.

It’s huge fun simply exploring, and while areas have ranked quests, a clever scaling system means that you’re always appropriately levelled but get worthwhile XP, so high-level players are de-levelled to quest with novice friends.

You’re equally driven by your character’s individual quest, based on their class, race and questions asked during their creation, which play out in individual instances. These admittedly vary in narrative quality but provide solid goals right up to the highest levels.

But nothing defines this living world quite like dynamic events that randomly spring up on the map. Anyone can simply join in, and few things are as joyous as being part of a huge cave troll attack, helping to escort a vulnerable convoy, or battling centaur legions as crowds of enthusiastic players flood into battle.

They can often be chaotic, cacophonous affairs, with spell-casters like Elementalists and Mesmers filling the air with pyrotechnics as Warriors dive into melee, while Engineers, Rangers and Thieves attack with bows or guns. These dynamic events do repeat, but it’s forgivable given the life they bring to the world.

That dynamism is echoed in GW2’s class system and combat. Members of any race can be any class, and they’re extremely flexible. All classes can self-heal, and combat skills are tied to weapons, with the ability to switch out between two sets.

All too often MMO combat entails simply spamming rote hotkey combinations while a virtual d20 determines combat. GW2 is more action-based; while those unseen numbers are still churning, you can manually evade attacks and even block, albeit with an energy meter limiting your acrobatics.

Knowing which abilities to use when is equally crucial in battle. All that combined with a very flexible skills/traits system means it’s easy to tailor your character to your play style.

To be fair, it’s only once you reach GW2’s dungeons, like the Ascalonian Catacombs unlocked at level 30, that most players will find themselves really pressed in combat, but by that time most will have joined a guild or have regular friends to play with, which as with any MMO takes the experience to a whole new level as you co-operate and raid in a more focused manner and gain the benefits of membership.

But, as ever, if you want to play solo, GW2’s inherently social framework means you’re never without aid from nearby players.

Of course the next natural step for many will be PvP, and ArenaNet has provided ‘the Mists’, a separate area that features both smaller team-based objectives and large-scale PvE battles.

Guild Wars 2 manages to marry great gameplay and good looks.

With all players bumped up to level 80 in PvP, it’s both a great preview of what’s in store and effective training in your skills. PvP is accessible from the start and can initially be overwhelming; PvE dynamic events are chaos, but it’s a Sunday school picnic compared to PvP.

Mastery of your class, teamwork and serious keyboard co-ordination are required, and it’s here that many MMO veterans are likely to end up spending their time.

That said, the objective nature of PvP maps, as well as additions like cannons, catapults and other fortifications, mean that any players can make themselves useful.

While GW2’s overall design is extremely accessible, it isn’t as good as it should be at introducing players to concepts like its very useful crafting system or weapons upgrades through gameplay; it simply pops up HUD notes telling you.

Given how most players will miss those instructions, they can often be left asking for aid. The story quests can also be ‘stop/start’, as you often aren’t high enough rank to go from one to the other, and with level-scaling you can’t just use the old MMO trick of grinding in lower areas to boost stats.

These niggles aside, ArenaNet’s ongoing rejection of the MMO subscription model and the concept of an endgame has allowed it to create a landmark game that, like World Of Warcraft, which brought greater polish to the genre, is going to redefine what people expect from MMOs going forward.

It’s very slick, enormous fun, continually dynamic, and more than any other MMO it brings the genre closer to the ideal of a fantasy world filled with hundreds of players in which just about anyone can lose themselves.

That sentiment, as much as anything else, makes it well worth playing.

It was never the unlikeliest of sequels – it could have been a PSP possibility, there was the chance of a DS incarnation and then, of course, the altogether plausible iOS version – but Cannon Fodder 3 came about in the unlikeliest of ways.

Licensed from Codemasters, owner of the Sensible Software property, developed by Russian studio Burut CT and, eventually, released worldwide by Game Factor Interactive, it’s not had the most straightforward or auspicious routes to our PCs.

And, in fact, some might wonder why it ever got beyond the borders of Mother Russia at all. For you see, this is a Cannon Fodder-shaped shell. It’s a husk that certainly looks the part, if you squint and only observe it from certain angles.

Those who made it have clearly played the originals: it’s a top-down, squad-based shooter where you control four fragile troops taking on near-insurmountable odds. Grenades are thrown, buildings are demolished, unfair deaths are had, vehicles are miscontrolled and it all comes together in a package that feels like it was made by people who knew what Cannon Fodder was.

What a shame. It looks like classic Cannon Fodder, too. What went wrong?

But it doesn’t feel like it was made by a team who knows what a new Cannon Fodder should be.

Unimpressive updated graphics and the addition of side missions aren’t exactly revolutionary additions to a 20-year-old formula, and technical hitches and general bad design hinders what can, sometimes, end up being decent fun.

It could be the enemies who rush in and stand so close to your troops that you genuinely can’t distinguish them from your own, meaning you might mistakenly think you are safe – all energy bars look the same, of course. It might be vehicles that have pathfinding skills worse than those of the jeeps in the original game.

It might be the combinations of these elements; or the sudden appearance of troops who take out your entire squad; or the explosive hitting nothing straight in front of you and killing everyone; or the way a checkpoint doesn’t auto-save, requiring an extra click for no discernible reason; or the questionable taste of having some exploding troops ‘hit’ the screen and be wiped off with windscreen wipers.

Why hasn't anyone released an iOS version? Surely Cannon Fodder is perfect for iPad?

Or it might just be that Cannon Fodder 3 isn’t very much fun to play. Its repetitive nature borders on the ridiculous, with objectives repeating over and again, and there is pretty much nothing about it that pushes you on to finish it.

There are times when nostalgia wins out; when you realise this is an actual Cannon Fodder sequel, but that’s quickly squashed down and washed away by a glitchy, boring and hugely underwhelming experience. In fairness, it’s nowhere near as bad as might have been expected. But saying that about a game doesn’t mean it’s at all good.

Back in 2003, Valve released a port of its phenomenally popular Half-Life mod, Counter-Strike, exclusively on Xbox. It was, in many ways, the perfect replica of its PC counterpart, offering console gamers the first chance to immerse themselves in the strategic first-person shooter with minimal tweaks to the original design.

The most noticeable alteration was the inclusion of a weapon wheel that stripped the game of its many shop menus, reducing it into a simple radial to benefit the console control pad.

This minute change was emblematic of the game’s fundamental failing: Counter-Strike wasn’t designed for consoles.

Nearly ten years later and Valve has returned with another Counter-Strike destined for a Microsoft console and, for better or worse, the weapon radial returns. Has Valve learnt nothing? Well, it turns out it’s learnt quite a lot, actually.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive isn’t another attempt at simply porting the original to additional hardware, but rather the first legitimate evolution of the brand since Counter Strike: Source overhauled the physics and aesthetics way back in 2004.

With that in mind, it’s interesting how much the first-person shooter landscape has changed in the interim. While both 1.6 and Source have remained a mainstay of PC gamers’ online routine, console shooters have been transformed by XP-driven experiences, fuelled by respawns, perks and those all-encompassing kill streaks.

Watch us take on one of the new modes to Counter Strike, Arms Race.

To say that CS:GO feels stripped-back by comparison will come as no surprise; but to say it’s the most elegantly balanced, skill-oriented and thrilling shooter we’ve had the pleasure of playing for quite some time… well, that’s a pill some might find hard to swallow.

The setup is simple: two teams – one terrorist, the other counter-terrorist – start at opposite ends of the map, with the two main objective modes involving either the terrorist team planting a bomb, or the counter-terrorist squad rescuing hostages.

Kills and mission success reward players with cash to buy weapons at the beginning of each round, and with zero respawns, players are encouraged to be a little more cautious with their tactics.

This is where balance comes into play. Regardless of how many hours you have pumped into online servers, every player starts off on an even standing.

That’s not to say that newcomers won’t feel the biting indignity of an early trouncing when they jump into the game for the first time – in fact, Counter-Strike players form one of the most hardened and elite communities in gaming.

But CS:GO rewards time, patience and earned skill, which unfortunately has become something of a rarity in the genre.

Players can prolong being chewed up on servers straight away. Weapons Course acts a serviceable introduction to the fundamental mechanics and offers a fleeting appearance of Valve’s trademark laconic wit, and is particularly beneficial to introduce console players to the controls.

We don’t care what you say: Aztec is Counter-Strike’s best map.

Elsewhere, two new modes – Arms Race and Demolition – feel a little bit more relaxed than standard team deathmatch rounds. Both are derived from Gun Game, which has had something of a renaissance in recent years since Call Of Duty: Black Ops included it as a Wager Match, but it actually began life as a Counter-Strike mod years prior.

Here, each kill rewards the player immediately with a new gun, with the first to cycle through all the game’s weapons declared the victor.

Meanwhile, Demolition is a welcome mix of standard bomb-defusal team deathmatch and a twist on the Gun Game rules, with players rewarded with a new weapon at the start of each round if they have registered a kill.

These two new modes come paired with some new maps, designed around intense, small-scale skirmishes, which, in fairness, the original game lacked. However, outside these two new modes, Valve hasn’t included any new maps, which is sorely disappointing.

So it’s the game you fondly remember, having undergone a substantial facelift and released with a few concessions for console gamers. Implementing a matchmaking system feels mutually beneficial for both console and PC players, but the radial shop menu is still a befuddling mess like it was nearly a decade ago.

Call Of Duty players might find the considered pace of Counter-Strike counter-intuitive, but patience pays dividends.

But it doesn’t take long to acclimatise yourself to the changes, both superficial and deeper-seated. Cast your mind back to the launch of Counter Strike: Source and it’s no surprise that its idiosyncrasies were easy to love, but in retrospect the game felt more like an imitation rather than a genuine innovation.

Global Offensive makes no such mistakes. Counter-Strike’s famed map selection has been refined and tweaked in the right places. Perhaps the most noticeable is an additional staircase in Dust, but this isn’t a blasphemous revision, but rather a fresh perspective based on years of telemetry at Valve.

Yes, it alters the environmental chemistry and map dynamic to a degree, but not in any overtly negative way. It’s just different and we like it.

Weapons have been mostly left alone, albeit with a few name changes here and there. The most notable new addition is the Molotov cocktail/incendiary grenades that unleash a huge spread of fire, perfect for blocking key avenues and rerouting enemies into your line of sight.

Other inclusions are largely ignorable and even verge on trolling – the priciest weapon is a bizarre electric single-shot one-hit-kill taser. It’s a testament to the enduring appeal of the core system that the original vision remains so gloriously intact.

CS:GO stands as a glowing reminder that quality game design is rewarded in longevity and variety. Valve has not only updated the shooter but has completely outclassed its contemporaries.

Orcs Must Die 2 is one of those rare specimens where adding a friend to the mix for chaotic cooperative action can only improve things. You might assume adding another player would detract from the hectic nature of the game, but Robot Entertainment's follow-up to the surprise 2011 hit finds the insanity amplified.

Think the only answer to thinning a crowd of tens to hundreds of orcs is sheer manpower? Think again. You're going to need traps, and a lot of them.

Strategic trap planning, systematic orc extermination, and skull collection are the keys to success. At the beginning of each round, you're given a fixed amount of time to place traps to keep the orcs at bay. Once you've arranged them in a satisfactory manner, it's time to release the horde.

The beasts will materialize in various shapes and sizes, from hulking brutes like ogres to your run-of-the-mill, more 'orc-ish' breeds. You'll need to make good use of the default arsenal at your disposal before you've a chance to purchase any other equipment: the Sorceress's long-range magical attacks and potential to charm enemies, or the War Mage's default close-quarters combat.

You can change your loadout through the Spellbook at the beginning of each mission, which houses your current inventory and items available for purchase with in-game skulls earned at the end of each level.

When all else fails, charm an enemy to hold them in place, then start pummeling away!

You'll earn skulls according to how many Rift points you racked up by completing levels under par time and other variables.

Up for grabs are a variety of weapons, like a Lightning Ring that summons forth a lightning storm or Vampiric Gauntlets that damage targets while healing the wearer, and more typical staples like crossbows and swords.

Trinkets augment your character and act as buffs to keep you afloat when things get rough, and additional traps may be purchased to beef up your simple spike and steam platforms.

Throughout fifteen campaign levels, you'll have multiple rest periods within each area to restock and recharge before readying up for the horde.

Forming a game plan is crucial, but it's not required in order to complete the game. If you choose simply to physically assault every orc on your own, beating them into submission rather than lying in wait after having set traps, you may still be successful, but it'll take some awfully powerful upgraded weapons to forgo them completely.

Once you've braved the campaign, you can challenge Endless Mode with a significantly larger number of orcs, or you can go back and improve upon previous runs to aim for a higher skull rating (a perfect rating is five).

Spraying acid all over orcs seems to be an effective crowd control tactic.

The frenzied fun of Orcs Must Die 2 stems from getting caught up in a whirlwind of orcs, trying to keep every last one of them from reaching the exit, while desperately trying to stay afloat. It's edge-of-your-seat stuff, and keeps you coming back for more.

The tightened feel to each level and the choice between both a male and female character go a long way to cement this sequel as the best yet, and quite honestly we're looking forward to a third.