The inclusion of state-of-the-art realism in modern videogames is a tricky topic with many avenues available to development teams keen to push the envelope. Some will burn through millions of dollars ensuring that the latest and greatest shooter to hit the market has the most ultra-realistic environments available. Others will be content with engineering a lopsided museum of modern art and merely encourage...

Probably the highest compliment that can be paid to Monaco: What's Yours Is Mine is the same that could be given to any of the best entries to the stealth/action genre — that the game is as fun in slow, thoughtful moments as it is when all hell breaks loose. Considering that each of Monaco's missions are comprised of delicate heists where a single slip-up will set off alarms...

The Sacred series has always managed to provide gamers with a fairly predictable hack ‘n’ slash roleplaying experience. Hardly “Game of the Year” stuff, but quirky and thoroughly enjoyable nevertheless. The original Sacred, released back in 2004, swiftly gained a captive audience with its meaty mob encounters and off-centre humour. Sacred 2 continued the trend in 2008, although by that time developer Ascaron had reached a little...

If you haven’t been following the development of Defiance, roughly two years ago the SyFy channel finally got the ball rolling on their dream to create a trans-media event. They made a single universe split down the center of your television screen. Coming in through the cable box is a weekly, hour long science fiction show about a human-alien colony trying to survive in a dystopian version of St....

It might seem like a cash grab, but remaking old titles with fancy graphics and enhanced features isn’t such a cynical idea. After all, what made a lot of older titles great were the design limitations at play in the first place. If a lack of memory or graphics capability prevented a certain gameplay element from being introduced, clever developers had to find a compromise to produce...

Although there's no shortage of massively-multiplayer online titles these days, Snail Games are hoping to draw in scores of new players with its new take on a traditional theme. Set during China's Ming dynasty, and centred upon the expansive and ever-popular wuxia fantasy, Age of Wushu features a classless permanent PvP sandbox environment with a large PvE component. Much like real martial arts, character progression is achieved with...

A Showdown Throwdown What happens when you take the best parts of 80s action movies and throw them in a blender with fast paced multiplayer and over the top violence? Chances are you would end up with something like The Showdown Effect from Arrowhead Games. The Magika makers have traded in Norse mythology for the dazzling neon of the 1980s in their new 2.5D side-scrolling shooter....

Blizzard, with StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, brought the popular franchise to a new generation of gamers, keeping the core aspects that made the game great while improving on them in almost every way. Heart of the Swarm offers players more of what made Wings of Liberty so exciting and does it in a robust, well realized package, making it well worth its $40 selling price. The...

Maxis may have the hardest job in game design there is. Managing the expectations of thousands of armchair city planners is something even municipal councils regularly fail to achieve; little wonder then that Electronic Arts’ subsidiary is feeling the heat with its latest release. SimCity , after all, is a legendary series. First released in 1989, it showed to an experimental industry that gaming victory...

Strike Suit Zero demands three things of its players: the audacity to engage in hectic dogfights in a fighter jet that can often seem as if its constructed of tissue paper, a desire to play pretend pilot to the point of overlooking a handful of significant design flaws . . . and, of course, the strong stomach necessary to withstand the motion sickness of air combat. Those with the...

The name A Walk in the Dark seems to have been a cruel prank on the part of Portuguese developer Flying Turtle Software. Yes, for the first dozen or so levels you’d be forgiven for thinking the game would be “a walk in the park,” but by the end the average gamer will be out for blood. You see, A Walk in the Dark is a hardcore...

Here in Canada the indie gaming scene is not only alive and well but it's getting stronger every year. Canada probably has one of the richest pools of young unsigned talent in the industry and a lot of that development talent is found within the borders of Quebec. I got an opportunity to meet a few of these Quebecois developers at the Montreal International Game Summit. One such team...

Magical Drop V is the latest in a sprawling line of me-too puzzlers that have jumped on the bandwagon over the years. Strangely enough, it's an actual attempt at revival that seems to have come out of nowhere. Magical Drop made quite the splash back in the 90s with its debut on the Neo Geo, and for the better part of that decade made a name for itself...

Natural Selection 2 is really hard. It isn't hard because the mechanics are bad and it isn't hard because of poor controls, muddy graphics or any other presentation issue: it's hard because it is meant to be played very seriously. Unknown Worlds Entertainment has crafted an extremely satisfying blend of first-person action and strategy with this new multiplayer title, offering up an experience that is equally...

Nothing To Lose In one sense, it’s pointless to write a review of Planetside 2 because there’s one school of thought that says reviews offer guidance to readers as to whether this product is worth your hard earned cash. Planetside 2 is free to play, so there is no cash involved. What becomes important then, is the question “Is this game worth your time?” And the answer...

It's funny how time works. Between the ages of, say, five and eleven years old I would have been absolutely bowled over by a game that allowed me to play as — or try to survive against — a dinosaur. Now, having experienced what is, strangely, one of the only recent videogames using this common childhood scenario as its premise, I can only assess Primal Carnage on the strengths...

If movies have taught me anything it's that children can't be trusted. One minute they're providing naive, heartwarming advice at the climax of a romantic comedy and the next they're pushing their mothers off of balconies, freaking people out by mysteriously repeating "redrum" or, in the case of Lucius' eponymous demon child, systemically murdering everyone they know. Movies are movies, but games treat children a bit differently,...

They Can’t All Be Winners The irony of Edna & Harvey: Harvey’s New Eyes is that I’d recently written a piece about how adventure games had gotten a new lease on life by abandoning the trappings of convention that defined them in the 90s. Then along comes this game that unpleasantly proves my point. Don’t get me wrong, Harvey’s New Eyes isn’t a terrible adventure. But it...

A Game of Dwarves sounds an awful lot like some parody of George R.R. Martin's epic fantasy, but it's actually a time/dwarf management endeavor that has players aiding the grumpy little buggers in creating sparse, underground kingdoms. Players are tasked with gathering a clan of dwarves to flesh out their diminutive dwellings, collect resources, and defend the land from outside threats. Keep the dwarves safe to enhance their quality...

Once anything is around for 20 years or so, a sense of nostalgia tends to kick in. Over the last decade classic videogames from the 8-bit era have become cherished relics for everyone of a certain age, from ironic Mario T-shirt wearing hipsters to sincere Mario T-shirt wearing nerds (which became a not-so-dirty word in the process, as well as a delicious candy). As a result, a new genre...