Review: Zombeer (PC)

Look hard and you'll see the
Plants vs. Zombies reference.

While 2011's LA Noire was made to accommodate and elevate many of my specific tastes in entertainment, Zombeer takes the things I like and beats them with a baseball bat and heaves the whimpering bundle into a dumpster.

While I revelled in the LA Noire's grittiness and attention to detail lavished on an open world adventure game dressed in an episodic police procedural from the 1950's, Zombeer takes everything base and stupid and throws it together without thought or planning. Zombeer opens with "K" waking up in a bar with a bad zombie bite and his girlfriend absent. From there the game wades through hacked together, uninteresting pop culture references.

Review: Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (PS4)

For me Call of Duty: Ghosts was a low point in Activision's much beloved series. The game represented everything I had come to expect from a franchise being released year after year.

Too much familiarity. For every moment of brilliance in the game, there were ten more moments of familiarity. Going into Advanced Warfare, I was both skeptical and excited about the new direction the franchise was headed. I knew that Activision could only make so many games based on Modern Warfare and that eventually we would see a game set in the future with new weapons, gadgets and vehicles. Advanced Warfare represents the biggest jump for the series since the game shifted from World War II to Modern Combat.

Review: Metro 2033 and Metro Last Light Redux (PC)

I can't recall a recent game that has so believably created a sense of place. Right from the get-go I bought into the sci-fi setup of the Metro games and the resulting hardscrabble life of living in underground tunnels. Little snippets of what life is like, coping with hardship, the various factions that have risen up in place of a central government, the cobbled-together devices and an economy driven by bullets and the ever-present threat of mutant attacks and the mysterious Dark Ones. During the periods of downtime I found myself poking around in corners trying to understand how these people are surviving. Even during periods of shooting, sneaking, and battling mutants I often lingered in "cleared" areas to soak in the atmosphere.

Preview: Destiny (Multiplatform)

Unless you've been sleeping for the last fifteen years or so, it should be a point of common knowledge that Bungie makes some really excellent shooters.  They did it with the Marathon series, they did it again with the Halo series, and they're looking to make the hat trick with Destiny.  Bungie faithful have been following the project closely and with their public beta test coming up, it's shaping up very impressively.

Preview: Evolve (Multiplatform)

When Turtle Rock Studios put out Left4Dead, they not only made shooters interesting again, they redefined the “zombie apocalypse” scenario in a delightfully demented fashion.  It wasn't just about blowing away zombies, it was about working with your buddies to make it to safety. Now, Turtle Rock is giving the sci-fi “bug hunt” scenario a similar shot in the arm with Evolve.

Review: Sanctum 2 (XBLA)

With more and more tower defense games around, developers have had to come up with new ways to make their's stand out from the others. Coffee Stain Studios created its own new combination genre, meshing tower defense with first-person shooting for their Sanctum franchise, now in its second installment.

Gameplay is simple in Sanctum 2: the gamer must defend cores from incoming enemies by constructing weaponry towers to protect them. But like a lot of tower defense titles, gamers don't just sit idly by, viewing their towers' success or failure against incoming wave after wave of alien enemies in many bizarre forms (an overwhelming number of them resemble insects and bugs). While the towers are doing their part, gamers can go into first-person mode to jump directly into the war zone and unleash FPS fury.

Preview: Call of Duty: Ghosts (Multi-Platform)

Set in the near future when the United States is no longer considered a world superpower, Call of Duty: Ghosts features the emergence of a threatening "unseen enemy." Rather than simply install a carbon monoxide detector or have the heat exchanger on their furnace checked out like most other countries would, the US forms a rag-tag group of elite soldiers to combat the threat. Commence dramatic rappelling! 

Review: Star Trek The Video Game (PS3)

Open a burlap sack and throw in every damn cliché of video game criticism. Fans of the genre, set phasers to fun, mixed-bag, movie tie-in. Close the sack with a chewed piece of rawhide and beat the whole thing with a pillow case filled with hammers then set the burlap ablaze.

Douse it with gasoline just to be sure it catches.

It's hard to escape the low-hanging fruit when writing a review for a game like Star Trek The Video Game...

Very specifically, THE GAME, you know, just in case anyone might mistake it for Star Trek The Cookware Set or Star Trek The Prostate-Specific Antigen Test. Though either one might be preferable because The Game's a bit of a transporter accident.

Review: Fuse (PS3)

Fuse is a third person cooperative shooter set in the not too distant future where the US military has started harnessing alien technology called "Fuse" to develop weapons. Fuse is basically a weapon of mass destruction and a hot commodity on the black market. A rogue paramilitary group named Raven, stages a successful attempt to steal the alien technology from the government. So, with the clock ticking, a team of four special operatives called Overstrike 9 are called into retrieve the stolen technology.

Review: Crysis 3 (PC)

 

Crysis 3 does one thing extremely well. And that's hit the player over the head constantly with loads and loads of bricks saying, "Hey, hey, hey, look how graphically awesome this game, uh, looks!"

Every time, I would tell the game, "I get it!" But every time I would stop and stare.

Not a glance and move on. My eyeballs would sear with polygons, blur effects, and stunning visuals! Let me see mo-o-o-ore!

Review: Far Cry 3 (PS3)

Far Cry 3 is a sequel in name only to the Far Cry 2. I was a huge fan of the first game in the series, but Far Cry 2 introduced too many changes for my liking. The whole malaria mechanic and running into enemies every five minutes while trekking across the African plains was one of my main criticisms of the game. Thankfully these problems are gone and Far Cry 3 is hands down one of the best action adventure titles I have played in a long time.

Review: Call of Duty Black Ops II (PS3)

When I saw Call of Duty: Black Ops II at E3 in June of this year, I couldn't have been less impressed. The demo we saw was hands-off and consisted of a walk through of the game's campaign and tactical strike missions. For the most part the game appeared similar to past iterations of the series. It wasn't until I actually got my hands on Black Ops II that my attitude changed.

Black Ops II does a lot of new things, while still feeling familiar.

Review: Halo 4 (360)

 

Halo 4 does just about everything a franchise property should. It's big and loud, brash and bold; tosses soup bones in the service of fans; refashions the old, performs some new tricks; kicks-off a second trilogy of games in style; and features a naked blue woman who's actually a computer program that has a weird relationship with the protagonist, Master Chief.

As slick as the single-player experience is, cracks begin to appear almost immediately and I started feeling more like a pecking barnyard animal -- you know, those 7-foot tall, armour-plated ones -- tasked with running an uncomplicated maze and hitting a button. Or three buttons.

Review: Ravaged (PC)

 

Not knowing the story behind how Ravaged was developed might have been for the best.

Part passion project, part Kickstarter success story -- 2 Dawn Games got more than double their $15K goal -- Ravaged is a pure multiplayer shooter set in a post-apocalyptic world. There's no single-player option, not even a tutorial, to provide the basics. While anyone with exposure to the Battlefield or Team Fortress games should have little problem adapting to the action, all players will have to learn while they play.

Review: Dishonored (360)

 

No doubt about it. Dishonored is a game along the lines of an alternate universe techno-Steampunk super hero game using a story framework demonstrated by the likes of BioShock and Half-Life 2 where a lot of the story and history of the game world is recounted without a word of dialogue.

Preview: Far Cry 3 (360, PC, PS3)

Island settings for video games have always seemed a natural fit.

The nature of an island, with its defined borders of water, means the action is easily contained with a natural obstacle, an aspect that is so important to any open world sandbox game. That's why Saints Row: The Third, Dead Island, GTA IV, Just Cause, Crysis, and even the original Far Cry, are all hemmed in by water. It's to the island setting that Far Cry 3 returns, leaving behind the savannah of Far Cry 2.

Review: Ghost Recon: Future Soldier (PC)

Moving at a slower step than most third-person shooters, Ghost Recon: Future Soldier rewards caution and scouting, setting up dominoes of perfect head shots, and team collaboration. Occasionally, the system branches into straight-up gun battles and on-rails blasting but that's more the exception than the rule.

Review: Inversion (360)

All Davis Russel wanted to do on a sunny, tranquil day is visit his wife and daughter as a noon respite from his tough and demanding job as a police officer. However, as he and his partner, Leo Delgado, head off to Russel's apartment, their world and lives and everybody else's gets turned upside down, literally, in the new third-person shooter on the Xbox 360, Inversion.

Borrowing heavily from the Gears of War franchise for its style, substance and gameplay (including "roadie running") Inversion plays like a Gears of War game, with one signature difference: the Zero G "flying" and offensive abilities as well as the inversion of the gaming environment, twisting and turning it in a manner reminiscent of an M.C. Escher work.

Review: Max Payne 3 (PC)

Max Payne isn't a broken man.

Hooked on pain killers, a stumbling alcoholic, and plagued by guilt, loneliness, and rage, Max Payne is a shattered man who continually screws up his job as personal security for a rich family in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Ultimately, he tries to pull himself together as an act of some kind of redemption, if not forever then at least long enough to "fix" things. It offers a simple contrast to the disassembly and dysfunction that drives the entirety of the plot, which plays out in extensive cutscenes and flashbacks to explain how Max wound up in Brazil.

Review: Starhawk (PS3)

Starhawk represents the fusion of multiple genres of gaming – Vehicle Based combat (Battlefield 3), hectic 3rd person shooters (Gears of War), and Real Time Strategy (Command and Conquer). This non-traditional mix makes for a very different type of gameplay – such that no two people will play the game the same way.

The universe of Starhawk is a future where pioneers stake their claims on far-off worlds all in search of Rift Energy, the new power source for a new generation. This valuable commodity is highly sought after and unfortunately fought over. People who have been infused with Rift Energy become drug addicts called Outcasts – destructive in hunting down anyone collecting it and trying to preserve as much of it as possible. You play as Emmett Graves, a security expert who helps defend these border claims from Outcasts. As your defeat enemies and collect Rift energy you can call down additional equipment – not only adding additional features to the map but bringing down vehicles or defensible positions depending upon need. As you can imagine you can quickly change the battlefield with the addition of new buildings on the field, or leave the battlefield all together by calling down a Hawk for yourself to fly above it.