Tag Archives: Review

Sky Island Review

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Sky Island Featured Image

Warning: This review contains detailed and unrestricted spoilers.

Sky Island is a puzzle platformer starring a vaguely humanoid star who collects stars. If your mind isn’t completely blown yet, let me add that you can collect coins for points, Goomba-stomp enemies and fall to your death via a bottomless abyss. Too pedestrian? Well, Sky Island includes the ability to horizontally rotate your two-dimensional perspective to bypass obstacles and rearrange the landscape to your advantage. Similar systems have appeared in games like Super Paper Mario and Miegakure, but the central mechanic most resembles the one in Fez, a currently unreleased puzzle platformer starring a vaguely humanoid thing who collects cubes.

Co-starring some of the tetrominoes from Tetris!

Sky Island is a puzzle platformer in the same way that Braid (which stars a vaguely humanoid thing who collects stars and puzzle pieces!) is; namely that while platforming skills and killing enemies are required to complete the game, they’re mostly tangential. The focus is squarely on navigating and manipulating the environment in order to collect every star and then afterwards it shifts to reaching the checkered block that demarcates the end of each level.

To add yet another …

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Space Pirates and Zombies: Impressions Part III

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Feature

Man, that Space Pirates and Zombies game is something else, right? What? You don’t know what I’m talking about? Sounds like you better read PART 1 and PART 2 of my time with SPAZ then!

When last we met, I anticipated the game becoming rather zombie centric. I expected to change up my combat tactics to better face large zombie fleets and to jettison many poor sprite people into the void. What I did not expect was for a massive shift in the game play and a widening of the game’s focus. I won’t be going into plot, but obviously I’ll be talking about this shift and its impact on the last act of the game. So if you want to keep this game a total surprise, then perhaps this isn’t something you want to dive right into. But if you don’t mind surprising mechanics being revealed to you, then read on. Well, alright, some smaller elements of the story will be revealed, but I promise to be vague for you.

I love this dude.

Shortly after some twists and turns in the games story, and some harrowing stealth …

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Review: Total War: Shogun 2

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Shogun 2 - campaign map

With their Total War games, British developer Creative Assembly have crafted some of the finest games made in the last decade. They’ve taken us from ancient Rome, medieval Europe, the Age of Enlightenment and now to Japan during the Sengoku-Jidai (Warring States period), coming full circle, as the very first Total War game was set there as well. Let it be said at once: Shogun 2 is probably one of the strongest and most refined games in the series, yet at the same time it feels stale and unoriginal.

As with the other Total War games, Shogun 2 is divided into two main sections. The campaign map and the battle map. On the campaign map you take the major strategic decisions, i.e. recruiting units for your army, moving said units on the map, constructing buildings in your provinces, managing the finances, among other things. Dilemmas are another addition, in which the player is faced with two choices regarding a situation. Every choice has consequences, though they are not always evident right away. While this might just sound like the addition of “RPG elements” (urgh!), it actually works quite well most of the time. Some of them may regard the arrival of …

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Review: Frozen Synapse

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FS

Frozen Synapse is best described as a top-down turn-based tactical shooter….yeah. Kinda like a mix between Rainbow Six and Counter-Strike. It was produced by a small British indie developer, Mode 7 Games, whose only previous escapade in the video games business has been a sword-fighting game called Determinance. In other words, a fairly inexperienced developer. But, more importantly, is it any good? Definitely. Probably one of the best tactical shooters to be released ever.

Although not all that common in indie games, Frozen Synapse (FS) has a quite hefty and lengthy storyline. It takes place in a not-too-distant scary future, in which all the denizens of this brave new world are connected to something called the Shape. A bit like a more ethereal edition of the Internet. The player, appropriately named Tactics, together with a merry band of rebellious former employees, have to take down an evil company named Enyo:Nomad. Most of the story is presented in text-form, which isn’t the most appetizing form of story-telling in a video game so even though it is intriguing, I found myself skipping through the text-boxes a lot of the time, trying to get to the point that it’s really all about. The combat.

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Kirby's Epic Yarn – Review

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not epic, but still cute

Developers: Feel-Good and Hal Laboratories

Publisher: Nintendo

Director: Kentaro Sei

Platform: Nintendo Wii

Perhaps epic is not the adjective I would use to describe Kirby’s new patchwork tale. Clever is the first thing that comes to mind, though I suppose Kirby’s Clever Yarn does not quite have the same impact. Kirby’s Epic Yarn is, despite being another puzzley side-scrolling platformer starring our inflatable pink friend, is innovative enough to avoid being just another Kirby game.

Epic Yarn‘s textile aesthetic is the first thing anyone will notice. It is, frankly beautiful, with anything and everything being made of stitched-down cloth, loose thread, yarn, buttons, zippers, anything one might find on their clothes. It is colorful and bright and does it without being gaudy, which is a nice break from all the brown and grey realism so popular these days. Of course, the idea of a textile-themed platformer brings Little Big Planet to mind, but playing the game I never once found myself comparing the two. Kirby is much brighter and more animated looking. Instead of having the world look like an actual construction of random objects and cloth, Kirby does not try to look at all realistic. It looks more …

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Thoughts on VIP Map Pack 3 for BFBC2

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Today I played a few matches of squad deathmatch on Nelson Bay, and I’ve got to say it: Nelson Bay must be the best map on the SDM mode. A bold claim? Perhaps. Hear me out.

Nelson Bay features just the right mix of all the other maps on this mode. The mode takes place in half of the second part of NB, as well as reasonably beyond the third section of NB. This makes the map bigger than Isla Innocentes, which frankly is too small, but not as big as Arica Harbor, which is too big. It doesn’t have an abundance of destruction 2.0 buildings which means that the pressure and excitement that is only possible on White Pass once the buildings are destroyed is experienced from the get-go. The main points of cover seems to be the landscape itself, but the map is not conducive of camping wookies. Not once during my matches did I encounter the usual camping problems which plagues this game. This automatically makes it better than maps like Laguna Alta on this mode.

If it does suffer from something, it would be the inclusion of the tank. The map is simply not made to support …

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Thoughts on the iPad From an Apple Newbie

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I’m not one of those Apple people, who only ever buys Apple products, and sheepishly follows the company, buy everything they ever make, travel the globe for Mac World, or camp in front of Apple stores the day before the release of a new product.

I recently bought a new laptop this past January. It’s good, it’s okay, but I really did want a Macbook. I just couldn’t bring myself to spend 1200 bones after taxes to get one. Truth be told, I was weary of the new Windows 7. Knowing what their past OS were like–ME, XP, and Vista–I really just did not want another piece of garbage. I knew these were pieces of garbage just based on people I knew who had Macbooks, some casual users and others Steve Jobs worshippers. They never complained about their OS, their browsers never crash, they don’t get viruses.

When the iPad was announced it was kind of like I was re-living the fallout after Nintendo revealed the “Revolution,” calling it a “Wii” and waving a remote around. People went, what the crap is this? Are they serious? …

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Alan Wake–Review

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Alan Wake is a psychological action thriller developed by Remedy Entertainment exclusively for the Xbox 360.

Alan Wake starts off with a quote from Stephen King, “Nightmares exist outside of logic, and there’s little fun to be had in explanations; they’re antithetical to the poetry of fear.” This introduction sets a false tone: Alan Wake far from explores the poetry of fear.

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THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: TWILIGHT PRINCESS – Review

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THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: TWILIGHT PRINCESS is a videogame developed by Nintendo EAD, published by Nintendo for the Nintendo Wii and Nintendo GameCube. The Nintendo Wii version was played for this review. It was directed by EIJI AONUMA.

This article contains the following types of spoilers:

Game description
Names of some of the featured dungeons, characters and villains
Overall description of the game’s beginnings

We from the Nightmare Mode would also like to spoil the following review and say that The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess is a good game and you should play it if you can.

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