This is not your average Telltale Games adventure. The developer best known for all-ages affairs like the Back to the Future and Tales of Monkey Island franchises has nimbly waded into the guts and gore of the zombie apocalypse with the first episode of its five-part take on The Walking Dead. A New Day is chock-full of all the bursting brains, eaten entrails, and sudden deaths of leading characters that feature prominently in both Robert Kirkman’s award-winning comic series and the freewheeling TV show adaptation. Marty McFly might not approve, but you certainly will if you have even the slightest taste for good zombie stories…and a strong stomach to deal with the many gross-out moments.

What makes A New Day so compelling is its attention to appearance, plot, and character development. To help with clarity, the art sheds the black-and-white style of the comics in favor of vibrant color, though it uses similar art to that drawn by Charlie Adlard in the current issues. Fans may yearn for an option to go into a black-and-white mode, but the game art builds nicely on its paper inspiration. The PC and console versions of the game look much the same, although the PC edition is best overall with the smoothest animations. The PlayStation 3 game stutters regularly, although never for long enough that this causes any problems. The only issue is the camera, which is often too close to the action to get a good look at your surroundings. You get a good cinematic view of everything, at least, although this doesn’t help much when you’re scrounging through the drugstore for goodies or checking out nearby zombies.

The story has been crafted adroitly to weave in and out of the events told in the comics and on TV, blending the new with the familiar. So while you take on the role of the previously unseen Lee Everett, the adventure takes you through parts of rural Georgia also visited by Rick Grimes and the gang. Many of the events here fill out backstories from the comics. You visit Hershel’s farm before he started that interesting collection in his barn, for instance, and rescue Glenn when he gets trapped during one of his scavenging runs.

All of the characters are very well written and voiced as individuals (none of the TV actors reprise their roles here, though), which makes you care about whether or not they get munched on by ravenous corpses. It’s difficult to get up from the game, so expect to finish it in a two- or three-hour single sitting. Granted, there are some cliches. Lee is a stereotypical man of mystery, with a sinister past that may involve his killing the US senator messing around with his wife. His kid sidekick, Clementine, while lovable and tough in her own right, is obviously a plot device to help tragic Lee find his way again.

Actual gameplay is of a more so-so quality. Although this is a point-and-click adventure, the puzzles are few and far between. Exploration is a must in a couple of places, and there are a few spots where you need to gather items to push the plot forward. Controls are basic. On the PC, you use a mouse-and-WASD combo, occasionally resorting to the number keys to change between the standard looking, taking, talking, and using abilities. Consoles work in a similar fashion, with the left stick moving, the right stick taking care of the point of view, and the four face buttons handling character abilities. Other than the control scheme, there isn’t much to figure out. Most of the game deals with interacting with fellow survivors through dialogue.

Conversations typically give you limited time to respond to comments, forcing you to decide whether to blow somebody off or make nice. No selections are absolutely wrong. You can be tough on a coward who ran away instead of helping a friend avoid being chomped, or be kind to a sharpshooting gal in the hope that she might just save your life at some point. Key dialogue choices change how the game plays out, although not in wildly dramatic ways. You make a friend, you make an enemy, somebody notices you telling a lie, that sort of thing. The main difference between choices is the severity of the tone taken by other characters when speaking to you.

Quick-time action sequences bring up more important options. You find yourself a heartbeat away from zombie chompers on more than a few occasions during A New Day. When this happens, you’re given a few seconds to either left-click/button-mash a wavering cursor on a zombie skull or hammer some keys/button-mash to fend off the dead guy’s groping hands and snapping teeth. Miss this, and you’re a juicy burger. Nevertheless, none of this is very challenging, and the mechanics are simplistic enough to draw in casual gaming fans of the Walking Dead comics and TV show.

The first surprise attack comes so suddenly that you barely have a chance to react before the teeth sink into your neck, but after that you can cruise through the moments of zombie mayhem, most notably a screwdriver/axe beatdown in a motel courtyard. What’s more shocking are the times when you’re forced to make the call between saving one friend in peril and giving one up to the hungry dead. These moments are unsettling and very true to the horrific nature of the comics, where beloved, long-running characters can be torn apart without notice.
Telltale’s Walking Dead series is off to a great start with A New Day. This is more story than game, so there’s little challenge in the hours you spend fleeing and fighting and talking about the zombie hordes. But that approach works here, allowing the game to build upon the cruel, character-driven comic series and stand apart from more mayhem-oriented zombie games like Left 4 Dead and Dead Island. This also lets you get to know the cast in a more intimate manner than would be possible if the episode were all about splattering zombies and solving puzzles. Although given the source material, you still probably shouldn’t get too attached to anybody.

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Tribes 2 was an awesome multiplayer experience. You will be glad to know that they put vehicles back in this version, they took them out for the browser-based version of the game.

Gametrailers.com

Botanicula’s story is as imaginative as its visuals, telling the tale of five creatures inhabiting a tree created by a falling star. A great puzzle game with some interesting graphics thanks to the “macro lens” type environment display.Explore this enchanting world in this video review.

Mark from Gamespot.com

Long before Mass Effect’s Reapers and Skyrim’s arrows to the knee, there were games like Eye of the Beholder: first-person dungeon crawlers that fell by the wayside with the advent of 3D graphics. Developer Almost Human has made such a triumphant return to the subgenre with Legend of Grimrock that the word “resurrection” springs immediately to mind. Grimrock is decidedly old-school, right down to including a PDF of graph paper for drawing your own maps.

You start out with a party of four prisoners who get unceremoniously chucked into a huge dungeon (the titular Grimrock) and instructed that if they can escape alive, all charges against them will be dropped. While Grimrock offers you a premade party to start with, you can dump them and instead custom create four stalwarts to suit your tastes.

There are four races to choose from: humans, minotaurs, lizardmen, and insectoids. Humans are fairly good at everything, while each of the other races specializes in one of the three classes: fighter, rogue, and mage, respectively. On top of race/class distinctions, Grimrock has a fairly simple statistical attribute system: when characters level up (by killing enough monsters), they get a number of skill points with which they can raise certain class-based skills (for example, air magic or staff defense for mages, and swords or armor for fighters). Raise a skill high enough, and you unlock a variety of perks, including stat boosts, new spells, and special abilities like backstabbing for double or triple damage.

While leveling your characters’ skills is critical for surviving the game’s many hostile encounters–some of which are brutally difficult–you need your own set of abilities, largely of the cognitive nature, for solving Grimrock’s arsenal of mind-bending puzzles. Sure, they start out easy enough–flip a lever here, jump down a pit there–but eventually they get so tough that even a grizzled vet will run screaming to the Internet for assistance. Still, there’s nothing quite as satisfying as putting the old noodle on the proverbial rack and coaxing forth the answer to a real nutcracker of a puzzle; the sense of satisfaction almost supersedes the sense of anticipation at collecting your reward of loot. Almost. Many of Grimrock’s puzzles are optional, and you can beat the game while leaving a lot of the really tough ones aside, but they do yield powerful treasures that assist you in Grimrock’s toughest (and totally mandatory) challenge: combat.

Where fighting’s concerned, Grimrock is a strictly tile-based affair. That is, you move a single square at a time, ahead, behind, or laterally. Enemies also move in this piecemeal manner, and combat generally consists of you and your foes ending up in adjacent squares and then, er, squaring off. You fight by clicking your characters’ two action buttons (one for each hand), which initiates an action based on whatever item is currently associated with that button. Swords swing, bows thwack, throwing knives hurtle toward enemies, and staves bring up the game’s rune-based magic interface. Here, you’re presented with a 3-by-3 grid of runes that you must combine to form spells that you cast by hitting the large staff button.

To the game’s great credit, these runes are logically connected to specific concepts (there’s one that signifies “fiery” things, one that signifies “projectile,” and so on), so you can experiment on your own, although the game does provide you with spell “recipes” at regular intervals, too. You’ll often make surprising discoveries, although mages cannot cast spells above their level, even if you manage to decipher the rune combinations through trial and error.

Whether you take the magic or melee approach, every action you take in combat requires a cooldown period to recharge, during which your characters can’t attack, and enemies will be pounding on you. Theoretically, then, your goal is to prevent your party from being attacked on more than one side by managing your physical position, while still bringing the majority of your front line and ranged power to bear on the bad guys and minimizing your cooldown exposure.

There’s a certain amount of depth to this system. But because the battles can be extremely difficult, you spend much of your time abandoning “real” strategy and instead simply floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee. That is, you run up to an enemy, launch all your attacks, and then run away while waiting for the cooldowns to recharge. You might think of this as “exploiting” the game’s AI, but even so, Grimrock’s battles are intense, much more so than the step-by-step movement around the map would seem to suggest.

That intensity is a good thing: overcoming a tough foe with your last ounce of magical energy or with a lucky critical hit is tremendously satisfying precisely because the game is so difficult. The same is true of discovering one of Grimrock’s cleverly hidden secret areas, or managing to survive long enough to get to the next life crystal, at which you can revive downed party members, heal, and save the game (don’t worry, you can save and load anytime, too). All of these high-degree-of-difficulty feats can frustrate you from time to time, but for that same reason, they bring a real sense of accomplishment when you finally overcome them.

Some of Grimrock’s old-school touches haven’t aged quite as gracefully as the difficulty level, however. While there’s enough variety in enemy types and map layouts to keep you on your toes, any given level of the dungeon consists of the exact same wall and floor tiles, the same two or three enemy types, and a few torches in sconces. That’s pretty much all you’re going to get a look at. Sure, the game’s concept is that you’re trapped in a dungeon, and that’s naturally not going to be a feast for the eyes, but Grimrock doesn’t even give so much as a little light snack for the eyes. There’s no music to speak of, either, so you may want to have tunes playing in the background. A solid player should get through the whole thing in less than 20 hours, even gathering the majority of secrets and solving most puzzles. Thankfully, Almost Human has promised to release new dungeons your party can adventure through, and fan-made content is surely on the way as well, to add more length and depth to your gaming experience.

All that said, this game costs 15 bucks. Given the level of intensity, the eminently satisfying challenge of the puzzles, and the surprising twists the story takes (not to mention the good loot!), it’s fair to say that Grimrock offers more enjoyment than you’d have any right to expect given the low price point. If you’re into the classic RPG motif, or if you just like a challenge that goes beyond crafting armor and performing endless fetch quests, Grimrock is worth your dime. Just don’t be surprised if you find yourself up late one night, surrounded by empty pizza boxes, your face illuminated by the warm glow of your flatscreen, trying to figure out that darn lightning puzzle.

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Blades of Time is a game about rewinding time that just so happens to also be a spiritual successor to the poorly received X-Blades. While developer Gaijin Entertainment can’t go back and prevent that abomination from happening, it can do the next best thing by creating a game good enough that we can begin to forget about their previous unpleasantness. Blades of Time may suffer from a thoroughly obnoxious protagonist and pitiful writing, but beneath its generic trappings lies a surprisingly well-made hack-and-slash title with an interesting central mechanic.

Army of Me

This may not be apparent from the beginning, however, as Blades of Time gets off to a rocky start. Protagonist, Ayumi, has transitioned from an anime pinup girl to a stereotypical blonde airhead trying to be Lara Croft. She’s even adopted a British accent. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, she begins the game slaughtering a room full of fellow treasure hunters, only to gain access to an orb that transports her to the mythical land of riches, Dragonland. (Can we all take a moment to appreciate that it’s actually called Dragonland?)

This confusing display of homicide is the least of Ayumi’s problems. Much more detestable is that she never shuts up. She spends the entirety of the game spouting out cringe-worthy dialogue like, “So the altars are sources of strength. Cool!” to no one in particular. She’s a bit like Charlize Theron’s character from Arrested Development, only without the humor.

It doesn’t help that the story is so forgettable that I’ve actually forgotten it. Apparently my brain figured it wasn’t worth the mental real estate to commit to memory, which doesn’t bode well when it remembers such useless crap as the lyrics to the Perfect Strangers theme song.

Thankfully, these red flags are downplayed once the combat system picks up steam. Blades of Time switches effortlessly between button mashing sword swings and third-person shooting. The focus is squarely on the former, but the latter is handled well despite there only being a few firearms. Whether you run and gun with a rifle, hunker down with a machine gun that requires standing still to fire, or slice away with your dual katanas, the combat is malleable enough to suit most playstyles. Your primary close quarters attacks don’t feel particularly powerful, but successive combos will build up your rage meter, allowing you to unleash elemental spells that reign down upon foes with a thunderous crash.
This is all well and good, but Blades of Time’s most unique attribute is Ayumi’s ability to rewind time. (This doesn’t have anything to do with her titular blades, incidentally, but I guess “Blades and Time” wasn’t so snappy a title.) Unlike the similarly titled Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, tinkering with the fourth dimension doesn’t simply reverse the last several seconds, but rather creates an alternate reality in which your prior selves replay your previous actions while you’re free to go about your business. These ghostly duplicates can not only distract enemies, but hurt them as well. Fire into a mass of foes, rewind, then watch your past self do it again while you hack away from the rear. Before you know it there are several apparitions of Ayumi slashing and shooting about, causing all sorts of mayhem. Balancing this on top of the already fleshed out combat system can get messy, but there’s a devilish delight bringing about such chaos.

Despite this, there are a few issues with combat. Tapping left on the d-pad to heal only works when you’re not otherwise occupied with an attack animation, so it’s easy to panic and tap it multiple times until it registers only to accidentally heal yourself twice. The sliding/dodge maneuver takes a little too long to recover from and context sensitive counters are finicky, due to it not always understanding which enemy your responding to. Still, these are minor glitches in an otherwise outstanding system.

Time Enough at Last

Outside of combat there’s a smattering of puzzles and platforming, though neither rise above the rudimentary. Too many puzzles rely on the same copy/paste designs of tasking players with standing on two or three switches at the same time. Solve this once, and you’ve solved it a dozen times, yet the game is content to keep throwing it at you. Given that The Misadventures of Mr. P.B. Winterbottom stretched the same time-based concept into a full puzzle game, it’s disappointing that Blades of Time’s brain teasers peter out so early.
This lack of refinement extends to a series of technical glitches. At one point the game froze on me four times, causing me to hard reset the system. After worrying I’d have to restart the game I finally made it through by making a concerted effort not to overdo the rewind feature. Even when the system doesn’t crash, processing dozens of enemies and multiple timelines can slow the framerate to a crawl.

Elsewhere, visually Blades of Time may not compete with any of the triple-A titles on the market, but rises above the lowly bar set by other budget titles. Some animations are ropey, lip-syncing’s nonexistent, and having only one character model for human enemies until they resemble an army of clones exposes the game’s modest budget, but environments are rich and detailed. Settings like a desert surrounded by a celestial plane or a series of floating islands bristling with glowing flora are particularly stylish. There’s no shortage of enemy designs either, and while some border an repetitive remixes, there’s still enough variety to ensure the sights stay fresh.

Outside of single-player, there’s a two-player online component in which players fight alongside a squad of AI companions defending their outposts while defeating that of their enemies. This can be played both cooperatively and in versus mode. Outposts shoot projectiles at you, though, so you’ll likely spend ages watching AI characters duke it out while firing upon enemy towers from a distance. Unfortunately, each structure takes far too long to damage, leading to monotony as you chip away at the opposition. It’s such an arduous, undeveloped mode that one wonders why Gaijin even bothered.

Time is on My Side

Blades of Time does everything it can to turn players off with its loathsome main character, daft script, and technical issues, but beneath all that there’s a competent action game with bold ideas befitting of a much better title. This won’t be enough to convert non-fans of the genre, but those who enjoy a good hack-and-slash or just want to chill out and feel like an ass-kicking timelord will find a good 8-10 hours of enjoyment from this. It may fall short of its potential, but given its humble roots Blades of Time successfully rewrites history into a reality where I’m hopeful at the prospect of a third game in this series.

G4TV.com

UK REVIEW–Love endures all things. Heartache. War. Watching your soul mate devour the pulsating flesh of hideous beasts. Pandora’s Tower is an action role-playing game crafted around this somewhat unusual premise. It’s equal parts fairy tale and wince-worthy body horror. An original approach to combat and a clever time-management mechanic set the game apart from the usual hack-and-slash affair. Throw in some intelligent dungeon crawling, and this bloodthirsty love story makes for a refreshing change of pace.

Singer Elena is turning into a beast. The telltale signs are all there: the sense of foreboding, the cursed mark on her back, and the fact that occasionally she sprouts tentacles and excretes purple slime. Thankfully she’s not alone. Protagonist Aeron is on hand to provide her with love, support, and beast flesh. The pair are guided to the Observatory, overlooking The Scar, a great rift in the earth held together by 12 chains, at the ends of which sit 12 towers. Within these towers, our hero is told, are monstrous masters who must be slain and whose flesh must be consumed by Elena so the curse may be lifted.

It’s an unusual premise, albeit one reminiscent of Shadow of the Colossus with added devouring. Each of the masters resides in a tower, a self-contained dungeon that you must traverse to reach your prey. These dungeons are filled with typical puzzles, traps, and beasties, all determined to get in your way. It’s not just a simple case of exploring, though. Elena’s curse gradually worsens, and the only way to prevent her from beasting out is to feed her flesh. As you trek through each tower, a gauge in the bottom corner shows the progression of the curse. Should you fail to reach the tower’s master in time, you need to head back to the Observatory and give Elena a gruesome, fleshy top-up.

In the wrong hands, this time-management mechanic could have been a chore, an artificial lengthening of the game via backtracking and time limits. Here, though, developer Ganbarion has riffed on the time-limit mechanic masterfully. It’s as much about area management as it is about time. Each tower has a bunch of shortcuts to activate, and pushing forward can often be a surefire way to find an easy way back. As you progress through the towers, looking for the chain fastenings which you’re required to break to access the boss door, you’re not only plotting your route forward, but memorizing your route back, pushing against the time limit until you can find a precious ladder to drop or door to unlock which provides easy passage back to Elena.

Areas are never sprawling or complex enough to cause you to get truly stuck, but they require enough pauses for thought that the time limit still feels like a constant menace. Returning to the Observatory doesn’t reset the dungeon’s puzzles, and the game never punishes you for returning to Elena. If the time-management mechanic had led to extensive backtracking and wasted progress, it could have been Pandora’s Tower’s undoing. Instead, it ends up being one of its greatest strengths.

Dungeon puzzle design may seem cursory at first; switches, levers, and locked doors must be manipulated to access further parts of the tower. However, later in the game the puzzle design really shines; you find yourself hunting sentient, color-coded roses to eradicate thorns, or tying pistons in place to act as platforms. The final two towers provide the game’s most rewarding puzzles, playing around with the established structure in ways that are best discovered for yourself. Much of the puzzle solving revolves around another of the game’s most interesting conceits, the Oraclos Chain.

The chain was granted to Aeron by the froglike Mavda, a member of the nomadic Vestra tribe who carries a skeletal old man on her back. It is a mystical artifact that has lost much of its power, and functions as a means of solving puzzles and as a lethal weapon. It works as a grapple–a little like a lengthy version of Link’s hookshot–and is used to retrieve distant items, reach grappling points, or swing from poles. An onscreen pointer lets you direct the chain, and a quick tap of the B button fires it off. It also allows you to zoom in for precision shots, slowing down time as you aim.

It’s pretty handy against monsters as well. Using the chain, you can rip weapons and armor from enemies, pick up an enemy and slam it, or even spin an enemy around to send it flying. It can be used to restrict an enemy’s arms, to pull it off its feet, or to restrain it and drag it around. All the while, you can charge the chain up and then yank it free with a flick of the remote, dealing massive damage to a foe. Then, after felling a monster, the barbed end can be used to tear free some precious flesh. Once you get to grips with the chain, it’s immensely satisfying. Nothing beats slamming a giant hornet into an ogre-type beast and dragging the ogre off its feet, or simply using the precision aim to fire off a volley of damaging shots.Aeron is also equipped with a sword, although a couple of other weapons can be found during the course of your adventure. Initially, the melee combat seems simple, with a single attack button that can be held and tapped to set off combos, and a basic block/dodge button. Your sword is always there as a backup to deal that bit of extra damage or take out weaker foes. However, the chain grants depth to the combat that makes Pandora’s Tower more than just the simple hack-and-slash it might initially appear to be. The game also offers Classic Controller support, although the Remote and Nunchuk combo is the superior control scheme here.

Fighting the masters is a different story. These large boss monsters have glowing weak spots in the form of master flesh, and their health bars can’t be depleted outside of hooking into this flesh and pulling at it. All the bosses share this structure, but they don’t feel repetitive because of their varied design. It’s not simply a case of hacking at the weak spot with the chain; each boss requires a different technique. One boss’s legs must be disabled and his back mounted to reach the point on his head, for example. A plant-based creature retreats to a beam of light to recover health, and you have to drag him back into the shadows with the chain. A couple of the bosses are fiddly due to the speed in which you’re required to aim at the weak spots while dodging their attacks. For the most part though, these fights are excellent, demanding both combat prowess and puzzle-solving ability from the player.

The combat isn’t without the occasional problem. Stubborn camera angles can sometimes cause you to be attacked by an offscreen enemy, although your view is never difficult to adjust (and being able to drag enemies into view with the chain helps immensely). The pointer controls take some getting used to, because you’re required to aim on the spur of the moment. Thankfully they’re precise and responsive, and the game eases you in with a forgiving difficulty curve. There’s a lack of variety in enemy design, and extra instances of the more creative enemy types would have been welcome, but it’s never enough to lead to fatigue.

Outside of the towers, the Observatory provides a hub for respite, crafting, and building a relationship with Elena. The dynamic between Elena and Aeron is a touching one, with their bond illustrated by a glowing bar on the left-hand side of the screen. This can be increased by feeding Elena flesh, as well as by giving her gifts and simply chatting to her. When you talk with Elena and Mavda, snippets of plot are revealed, and major developments come by way of visions Elena receives after eating. The story of Aeron and Elena is a grounded, human one in a world of monsters.

Elsewhere in the Observatory, Mavda and her skeletal companion are on hand to sell you items and craft things with the loot you find in dungeons. Armor, medicine, and new items can be created, and weapons can be improved. It’s possible to spend hours simply collecting things from towers to upgrade to the best equipment, although the game never forces this on you. Instead, it works on the principle of the more you put in, the more you get out of it, something that comes into play upon completion, when a New Game Plus option opens up new areas and items to strengthen your bond with Elena. With five endings and plenty of postgame content, there’s a lot to do beyond the initial 15- to 20-hour completion time.

Character designs are excellent; Mavda is a pallid, amphibious old hag while Elena possesses simplistic beauty–at least until she starts to sprout probosces. Aeron’s the most traditional, a striking knight in white and gold, and the only fully human character in this frightening realm. The beast transformations are also suitably stomach churning, and the scenes in which Elena eats flesh are disturbing, managing to be creepy and sad at the same time. The soundtrack, too, is excellent, featuring various reimaginings of classical pieces. The highlight is the main theme, which is a wonderful rearrangement of Verdi’s Dies Irae.Pandora’s Tower melds together some interesting mechanics into a brilliant whole. When put together, the different aspects create an excellent, melancholy adventure that combines the joy of exploration and discovery with an unusual combat system and a wonderful central love story. It’s a great journey even on the surface level, and the more you put into it, the more it rewards you.

Gamespot.com

There are many different creative tricks game developers use to add spice into well-worn genres to keep them feeling fresh, but sometimes, it’s the simplest and least-expected ideas that yield the most alluring fruit. 11 Bit Studios takes traditional tower defense gameplay and turns it inside out by putting you on the offensive in Anomaly: Warzone Earth. Leading a convoy of high-tech military vehicles through the mazelike streets of a postapocalyptic Baghdad to infiltrate a giant energy dome and take down heavily entrenched alien forces is an enthralling exercise in combat strategy and quick thinking. The need to continually plot pathways, adapt to new adversaries, and lay down a constant stream of support power-ups to keep your convoy from being annihilated is thrilling stuff.

While they’re slowly traveling along the path, blasting at any foes within weapons range, you get to run around on foot to scout ahead, distract enemy turrets, and deploy weapon power-ups to keep them safe. Additionally, you can bring up a tactical map screen at any point to adjust the travel route of your convoy on the fly or scope out the action ahead to concoct an appropriate battle plan. Anomaly: Warzone Earth is all about playing mother hen to your growing squad of armored alien-stompers, and the challenge of ferrying your forces through some of the bigger, crazier maps unscathed is enough to make you feel like a champ when you power through the hairy stretches successfully.The action gets off to a weird start, thanks to an outlandish plot setup, but everything soon settles into a steady groove. Mysterious alien invaders have landed in Baghdad and Tokyo, erecting force fields around both cities and digging in for a hard fight. As the head of an armored military column, your mission is to find a way to break through the energy barriers, battle your way to their core, and shut down your extraterrestrial foes before they can wipe out the entire planet. This requires shoehorning your forces through heavily fortified enemy positions with a limited amount of funds and units available for resupply. However, Anomaly’s creative take on tower defense goes well beyond a mere role reversal in the combat department. Instead of having direct control over your convoy’s armored vehicle units, you plot a course for them on a strategic map and let ‘em rip.

Between putting careful thought into the paths you pick and deploying power-ups with split-second timing at just the right spot, there’s a lot to juggle, but it’s a fun blend of chaos. Controls on the XBLA version aren’t quite as streamlined as they are on the PC, but they work equally well. It’s still easy to manage your team amidst eruptions of frantic combat, and having to balance fluctuating attack plans with the need to defend your own convoy keeps things moving at a brisk pace.

Despite his tiny, vulnerable size, your command character has some neat tricks at his disposal, like laying down a smoke screen, repairing units, dropping nukes, or making your convoy temporarily invisible to the enemy. Each of these area-of-effect abilities is triggered for only a short time, and the way you use them is often more important than the actual makeup of your squad. Destroying enemy defenses sometimes triggers an item drop and adds cash resources to your pool. This frequently makes it necessary to plot multiple routes to clear out pockets of alien scum to boost the power and size of your convoy.
However, throwing your convoy at the enemy without some forethought is a quick way to get wiped off the map. There’s a lot of strategic flexibility in how you choose to deck out your convoy in most missions. A mix of tanks, armored personnel carriers, rocket-launching robots, shield-generator drones, and other special vehicles can be purchased and upgraded. Selecting their positions in the convoy lineup can also make a huge difference in the outcome of battle.

Anomaly’s two main city backdrops are lush settings that brim with devastation and subtle visual flourishes. You muscle your troops through a variety of gorgeously decimated locales, such as gutted buildings, winding streets lined with cracked concrete and abandoned cars, and rippling waterways cluttered with derelict ships. The game’s varied missions change as frequently as the scenery. Most have you working to get your convoy to the safety zone intact, though additional objectives are woven in at almost every stage. Protecting a flying aircraft from the ground, taking down special targets that use your abilities against you, and working with a limited spread of units are among the more challenging twists.

The gameplay rarely gets repetitive. Even with only about a dozen stages, the main campaign is lengthy enough to keep you engaged for a good amount of time. Two additional modes are unlocked as you progress through the campaign, and each delivers a variation on the intense action. Baghdad Mayhem mode has you working to quickly destroy heavily fortified enemy power generators within a set time limit, while Tokyo Raid sends you battling across 18 island maps to destroy your adversaries. The XBLA version also has six additional challenge-based virtual reality maps that feature a slick visual style and extend gameplay. These extra modes round out the campaign, offering more of the same enticing action found in the main game without all of the story elements.

Anomaly: Warzone Earth’s fresh perspective on the traditional tower defense setup makes for an exciting entry in the genre, and exploring familiar gameplay from an entirely different angle makes the action even more exciting. It’s surprising how much of a difference a few simple tweaks can make toward revitalizing a genre that has long grown stale for some players. Being able to think strategically while under fire is a must in Anomaly: Warzone Earth, and the many twists that pop up along the winding road to victory make this game a winner.

Gamespot.com

The monster slayer speaks to the soldier with quiet confidence. He signals with his fingers, his yellow eyes shine, and the soldier reveals his secrets without the slayer ever needing to unsheathe his sword. The witcher is gifted for his patience, and now, Xbox 360 owners are similarly rewarded: one of 2011′s finest adventures has come to Microsoft’s console, and it was well worth the wait. The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings – Enhanced Edition is a treat for the mind and a joy for the senses. This superb role-playing game hits hard, drawing you into its dark fantasy world and requiring you to make difficult choices with palpable consequences. As Geralt of Rivia–the titular witcher–you seek answers in lush landscapes and burning battlefields, where great despair casts long shadows on even the sunniest meadows and lakes.

You may have heard about the stupendous visuals of The Witcher 2 on the PC, and probably wonder: how does the Xbox 360 version compare? It should be no surprise that the console release can’t match its higher-resolution PC counterpart, which was a standard-setter on that platform. Shadows are less extensive, the draw distance isn’t quite as astonishing, and some texture pop-in, jittery transitions, and longer loading times will stand out to anyone who has seen the game running at the highest settings on the PC.

And yet there is no reason to suppose you are getting a halfhearted PC-to-console port here. The Witcher 2 is wonderful to look at, brimming with visual details that refuse to be lost in spite of the hardware’s limitations. Inspect the crumbling walls of an ancient city, and you notice how every rock, rune, and fissure is unique. Nothing looks copied and pasted, but either painstakingly crafted by hand or hewn by natural forces. Soldiers genuflect as royalty passes, yet they’re not unnaturally synchronized, but instead bow and rise as individuals. A gorgeous waterfall makes for a glistening tapestry, behind which lies darkness and death. A red scar above a defiant elf’s upper lip is not just a testament to past conflict–it suggests a permanent scowl.

Welcome to the world of The Witcher 2, which is alive with activity yet tinged with violence and sorrow. The opening moments ready you for the game’s brutal overtones, showing a captive Geralt of Rivia whipped and taunted by his jailers. Geralt’s defaced flesh is a horrific sight, but thematically relevant: he is scarred by his past. Once thought dead, he is still piecing together memories of a savage battle and a beauty called Yennefer. The story takes its cue from these lost memories, juxtaposing sex and brutailty. It also presents both as inevitable and natural results of the mortal condition. You can bed various women in The Witcher 2; ploughing (that is, sex) is a frequent subject of conversation, and one of Geralt’s favorite pastimes.

Prostitutes and lusty soldiers are commonplace in The Witcher 2, though women are hardly relegated to carnal duties. The game’s female characters hold great sway in the political landscape, including Saskia the Dragonslayer. This freedom fighter speaks with such force and confidence that it’s no surprise she should command a dedicated following. Her nemesis is King Henselt, whose arrogance and robust brogue make him an equally authoritative presence. They are both voiced with great gusto, and contrast with Geralt’s cool, measured delivery. And that’s as it should be: Henselt and Saskia must inspire their disciples. Geralt, known as the White Wolf, is also a lone wolf.

They are but a few players in The Witcher 2′s tangled political plot, which involves so many characters and so much lore that you might be initially confused. But even when things get twisty, the fearless Geralt is there to ground the story. The witcher searches for clues to his past, as well as the royal assassin that ended the life of King Foltest at the conclusion of The Witcher. If you didn’t play The Witcher on PC, don’t worry that you’ll feel lost: the prologue does an excellent job of catching you up on the events that preceded the sequel. Nor do you need to wonder about the assassin’s identity; it doesn’t remain a secret for long, and it’s quickly clear that The Witcher 2 is no murder mystery.

Instead, The Witcher 2 is a chronicle of discovery, redemption, and political upheaval. Geralt is blamed for Foltest’s murder, but as he gets closer to the true killer, he becomes more and more involved in the region’s power struggles. Those assisting Geralt on his quest include the flamboyant bard Dandelion and the earthy Zoltan, a foul-mouthed dwarf who, like most of The Witcher 2′s dwarves, loves women and drink. Dwarves are a rich source of humor in most role-playing games, and The Witcher 2′s are no exception. Yet, the tone is different here. These are the raunchiest dwarves you’ve ever encountered, yet the comedy is undercut by underlying anguish.

In fact, a deep undercurrent of pain and suffering flows beneath each character and event. A mother’s unspoken agony taints the wonder of childbirth. A father’s drive to protect his son may brand him a coward in his own progeny’s eyes, but it’s a price he’s willing to pay, and Geralt isn’t one to turn down a bit of coin–or in this case, some pertinent information. Many quests, including those new to this edition, involve the game’s signature moral dilemmas. Whom do you believe: a soldier with hygiene problems haunted by a wraith, or the wraith that accuses the soldier of her own murder? Do you absolve a pair of nobles of treason, condemn them, or spare one and sacrifice the other? In this complicated world, there isn’t necessarily a right choice. There is no meter to determine whether you are being “good” or “bad,” and Geralt is neither hero nor villain.

Not including the prologue and epilogue, The Witcher 2 is split into three acts. The first is primarily concerned with following the killer’s trail, while the second greatly expands the plot. The convoluted plot seems poised to explode in the final episode, only to fizzle at the end. The lack of closure intimates a sequel, and the final act is abrupt when compared to the robustness of the first two. Nevertheless, there is no reason to feel slighted, as the journey is entertaining and reasonably lengthy, given several hours of additional gameplay over the PC version’s initial release. Yet what makes The Witcher 2 most impressive isn’t its length or its vastness; it isn’t an open-world, content-stuffed game in the way of the Elder Scrolls series. Instead, its triumph is in how your decisions fundamentally transform your journey.The Witcher 2 is essentially multiple games gracefully molded into a single experience. The second act, for instance, tells a very different tale depending on choices you make beforehand. You might comb beaches and battlefields or go spelunking with a group of profane dwarves at your side, in each case making a different region your base of operations. By their very flexibility, many RPGs inspire replay, but few offer such differing paths, allowing you to experience a complex narrative from distinct points of view. The characters at your side, the enemies you face, the dialogue–they all differ based on a series of decisions that the game never forgets.

Cities and wilderness areas are relatively contained, though just extensive enough to encourage exploration. In doing so, you might uncover a chest that can be opened only by interpreting the clues on a nearby scroll, or stumble upon a giant arachnid guarding treasure. A number of stupendous action moments punctuate your travels. You won’t remember just the big story developments, but the sequences in which you clutch your sword and stare down the danger ahead with savage resolve. In one such scenario, you slash away at grotesque representations of hate and violence, the whispers of magical incantations barely rising above the distant noise of steel on steel. Elsewhere, terrifying screams and flurries of feathers make your first encounter with a gaggle of harpies unforgettable, and the squawks and growls of unseen wildlife intensify your showdown with an endrega queen.

While there are a few different kinds of weapons you might wield, you usually choose between your silver and steel swords, depending on whether you are facing monsters or humans. You perform both light and heavy attacks from a third-person view, and can block and cast signs (Geralt’s magic spells) as well. Before you leap into the prologue, you might want to check out the tutorial, though it isn’t strictly necessary, as the first proper combat encounter isn’t nearly as punishing as it was on the PC. It might take you a few tries, but you eventually grasp the rhythm of swordplay. Crowd control is important: you want to avoid getting surrounded at all costs, and bombs and traps can make all the difference when the odds look overwhelming.

The Xbox 360 release benefits from a reasonable difficulty curve, but there are some frustrations here and there. The manual targeting system is fiddly enough that you’ll likely let the game’s auto-targeting take over for you, unless you face a single enemy, or maybe two. You might inadvertently tumble toward an enemy behind the one you meant to attack and find yourself in the center of a deadly mob. There are also moments when basic actions don’t feel as responsive as they should; unsheathing your sword might take a couple of button presses, for instance. Yet the action is largely satisfying and enjoyable. There’s a palpable sense of weight in every swing. Geralt might somersault toward his victim and slash him with a steel sword or use a flaming staff pilfered from a succubus to land slower, heavier blows.

Even when you know danger is ahead, the views are too attractive not to press onward. Death is inescapable, but The Witcher 2 allows you to properly prepare before trying to conquer the wilds. You aren’t stuck with the same weapons and armor, of course. You loot new ones or buy them from vendors, and these can be upgraded in various ways. You might also purchase equipment schematics and have a vendor craft items for you using the iron ore, timber, and other raw materials you stumble upon as you explore. You can also brew up potions and quaff them, though you can’t just down a health drink in the midst of battle. Instead, you must down potions while meditating.
Potions are toxic to Geralt; thus, the number you can drink is limited. It might take you a while to come to terms with this “prepare in advance” approach to potions. Brews act as statistic buffs rather than immediate cure-alls, and unless you know what monsters you might be coming up against, you don’t necessarily know which potions are most effective. When the story snatches you up into a series of battles and cutscenes, you may never be allowed to meditate and, thus, never reap the benefits potions may have granted. Thankfully, the long animations depicting Geralt entering and exiting his meditation pose have been removed, making this process less arduous.

It may also take some time to get used to the interface. It isn’t complex but there are some minor idiosyncrasies, some of which are rather sensible. You can’t hold a button to identify loot and items of interest as you can in other RPGs; instead, you activate Geralt’s medallion. It’s a neat way of taking a game-y function and making it seem more natural. Other interface quirks are less understandable. In most RPGs, once you exhaust a particular dialogue tree, you are usually allowed to select other options before exiting the interaction. In The Witcher 2, you might get thrown out of the conversation and have to reengage the character to explore other options. It would have been nice to compare equipment at a glance, rather than have to select a particular menu option. There are other quirks too, such as picky contextual prompts (you might disarm a trap instead of swinging at an attacking nekker), but they are small blemishes on this ambitious adventure.

Though combat is central to The Witcher 2, it’s far from the only thing you do as Geralt. You can earn some coin by trading blows with certain locals, which means performing a relatively easy sequence of quick-time button presses. Timed events show up in boss fights and in other scripted sequences as well, though the game doesn’t focus on them, and they make for a fun spectacle: the close camera angles and barbaric punches give brawls a lot of pizzazz. The PC version’s arm-wrestling minigame returns as well and controls far better with a controller than it did with a mouse and keyboard. You can even go get a haircut or play some dice when you aren’t busy chatting up the local ladies or hearing of Zoltan’s latest exploits.

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings – Enhanced Edition is an excellent port of a superb game, embracing many of the elements we love about RPGs without skimping on any of them. But it’s the way it handles player choice in particular that makes it most notable. There are no contrived right-versus-wrong decisions to exploit. The results of your decision don’t just influence minor details: they lead you down wildly disparate paths, each as entertaining as the others. The Witcher 2 is a mature game indeed–not just because of its sexual themes and violent images, but because of its complex portrayal of morally ambiguous individuals struggling in a morally ambiguous world.

Kevin VanOrd Gamespot.com

The hub contains digital terrestrial and satellite television tuners and a 500GB hard disc drive for storing recorded programmes. Nasne is used in conjunction with “Torne”, a dedicated PS3 application that supports recording programmes and transferring them to the Vita, Sony tablets and Xperia devices. (The “Torne” application shouldn’t be confused with torne peripheral ISDB-T tuner released for the PS3 in 2010.)

By connecting a PS3 online through a LAN connection and then installing Torne, version 4.0 users will be able to watch and record digital terrestrial and satellite TV. For every Nasne device connected to the PS3, up to a maximum of four, you can record an additional channel simultaneously. It can also stream programmes to Vita or a Sony tablet.

The Vita will be able to record and watch digital terrestrial and satellite TV through a “Torne for Vita” program later in 2012. Nasne can convert a downloaded, or downloading, program from the PS3 into an exportable file and then send it to the other Sony devices via Wi-Fi for watching programmes on the move.

Sony already released the TV tuner “Play.TV” for the PS3 in 2008 in the UK, Germany, Italy, Spain and France, which allowed users to watch and record TV to their PS3s. This would represent a big technical improvement.

Nasne launches in Japan on 19th July for 16,890 yen (approximately £133). No planned release in Europe or North America has been announced.
Ign.com

First appearances can be mighty deceiving. Fez starts as a simple platformer in a brightly colored world. Within minutes, you don a magical hat that lets you rotate the world on its axis, revealing hidden doors and linking previously unconnected paths. A shift in perspective is just the beginning of Fez’s quest to make you view the world in unexpected ways. There are mysteries buried within that only the dedicated will uncover. You may spend hours tromping through the inviting locales before it dawns on you that something greater lies below the surface, and once that thread becomes untangled, you find yourself exploring with a newfound purpose. It’s this marriage of styles–of a pleasant platformer mixed with a cerebral puzzler–that transforms Fez into a captivating adventure.

The universe is tearing apart at the seams. It’s a premise that could lead to a feeling of foreboding doom, but Fez shakes off this dour situation by infusing the world with a serene aesthetic that beckons you onward. You play as Gomez, a huggable creature with an oddly expressive face. He has a huge job handed to him: Repairing the bindings that hold the universe together. And he accomplishes this feat by traveling to a previously unheard-of place: the third dimension.

You can rotate the world in 90-degree increments. Ledges that were so distant you couldn’t possibly leap from one to the other suddenly touch once you swing the world, and this basic concept is expanded upon as you go deeper into the adventure. Springing mushrooms rush under your feet, explosions tear at the weak points of a wall, and ladders magically fuse together. It’s a marvel to explore the wealth of ideas this mechanic brings to life, but its appeal is short-lived. There’s the underlying feeling that the main tool you use to manipulate the world is little more than a gimmick, a simple novelty, and this thought is cemented by the sheer ease of your adventuring. It takes only a bit of trial and error to clamber to new ground. So you peacefully climb ivy-covered walls and turn cranks, enjoying the sights without ever being fully engaged.

That’s not to say the platforming elements are poor. The first few hours introduce so many concepts that you don’t have time to think about how simple it all feels. It’s when the new ideas become commonplace that doubt creeps into your mind. Thankfully, this black cloud is kept at bay by the pristine presentation. Fez is a world you want to exist in. It begins with a crystal-clear sky, green pastures, and peaceful inhabitants that make you grin from ear to ear, but Fez wastes little time before it changes moods. Thunder crashes in a rain-soaked cemetery, scaring you even though no enemies exist in the entire game. The music complements the visual style every step of the way. From charming to frightful and even melancholy, the excellent score pushes you through a wide range of emotions.

Charming aesthetics ensure there’s always something going on in the background to demand your attention. In one stage, a turtle spins on his belly like a top, flashing the shiny shell that is the envy of the reptile kingdom. Birds perch on nearby trees only to fly away when you come close. An inchworm crawls along a small ledge halfway up a towering tree. There’s an ecosystem in Fez that invites curiosity. You stare at the animals and wonder if they notice the galaxy crumbling around them or if they’re just content viewing your silly antics.

There’s more to the background than the quiet solitude of the animals. Enter a furnace room in town, and you see pages taped to the wall. There are shapes resembling Tetris pieces alongside squares with odd patterns in their centers. Why are these here? The same question pops unprompted into your head when you enter a nearby classroom. What do these esoteric drawings mean? Happen upon a neon-lit city, and a billboard of a creature that looks remarkably like Gomez has a giant speech bubble protruding from his lips. But the words are gibberish. Is he trying to communicate or is it just decoration?

These background images could be the key to revealing every secret that exists in this world, or they could be graffiti to keep your eyes occupied while you jump around. It’s hard to say what meaning they hold, so you press on. Carvings on trees and in stone columns look familiar. You’ve definitely seen the ancient marking that circle a bell before, but where? And what does it all mean? There are secrets in Fez that take hours to decipher. Uncover a hidden map, and stare at its obtuse markings. Is it hinting at a treasure? Or just messing with your mind? And those artifacts, they must have a purpose, but what could they possibly do?

The game does explain that secrets litter this world. When you zoom out to the world map, you see a sprawling assortment of stages that fly off into hubs and spokes that make it very difficult to get your bearings. But markings along the borders indicate what each stage holds. Cubes are the currency of progression, and there are 64 in all. But you need only 32 to reach the initial ending, and those can be obtained by the simple platforming. It’s the second half–the anti-cubes–that pose the biggest challenge. You earn these by solving puzzles that don’t even seem to pose a question, let alone demand an answer, and it takes all of your intuition to figure out what’s being asked of you.

The obtuse puzzle layout is a detriment at times. You enter a room with nothing but a door and some water in it, and yet the map clearly indicates that a puzzle is present. So you jump into the water, rotate the screen, and maybe even utter a curse under your breath, but nothing happens. And your mind begins to wander. What sort of puzzle do I have to solve? And is it even possible to complete at this time? In Fez, you don’t gain access to new abilities as you progress. Rather, you gain new knowledge. It’s possible, but extremely unlikely, to pass every puzzle your first time through, and this doubt becomes a detriment to your enjoyment. Because it’s not clear if you have the data to solve a puzzle, it’s easy to become discouraged and frustrated.

This is compounded by the dumbfounding level layout. Dozens of stages are spread across the land and jut out at incomprehensible angles. Getting to a specific place takes far longer than it should because it’s never clear where you need to go. A stage may contain a half dozen doors, and it’s tedious trying to figure out the correct path. Warp points help this problem, but they’re only a Band-Aid. Without quick traversal, solving the myriad problems becomes exasperating. To make matters worse, the stages don’t even have names that would make identification easy. The map system is a convoluted mess that clashes with the enthralling aesthetics and adds extra burden to your puzzle solving.

But it’s worth putting up with the absurd layout. There’s no better feeling than when you make a breakthrough on a particularly nasty puzzle. The warm glow in your stomach makes all of your struggles seem worth it, and this delight refills your enthusiasm to see what other secrets you can uncover. The lack of hand-holding is welcome in Fez, despite the roadblocks it creates, because you feel empowered when you finally have that “Eureka!” moment. Everything you accomplish comes down to your hard work because there’s little chance you’ll luck into figuring out what to do. Fez is a game you will get stuck in; you will wonder where to go and if it’s even possible to get every cube. It can be discouraging at times. But the respect it has for you, that you can figure things out without help, is an idea that should be embraced instead of shunned.

With dedication, you can figure out the hidden elements that make Fez such an intriguing adventure. But there’s no way to avoid the punishment you receive from the technical limitations. Hard crashes are a pain you have to bear. Frequent saves ensure you don’t lose progress when you’re kicked out to the dashboard, but these carry an added annoyance. Autosaves make the game stutter, causing you to potentially miss a jump in the process. Other times, you (or the block you need to solve a puzzle) could glitch through the ground and into a gaping abyss. You might go hours without any technical problems surfacing, but when they do, your fun is derailed in a hurry.

Fez has pitfalls you have to accept if you’re going to enjoy this adventure. Technical problems, baffling map design, and obtuse puzzles can serve as a serious barrier to entry. But it’s worth putting up with the missteps for the wondrous adventure that awaits. Fez goes far deeper than the simple platformer it initially appears as, and figuring out the solutions to the many puzzles is an experience that harks back to a time when games weren’t scared of taking off the leash and letting you run wild. Invest time in Fez’s colorful world, and enjoy the wealth of incredible ideas buried within.

Tom Mc Shea Gamespot.com