Review Archives (Reader Reviews)

You are currently looking through reader reviews for games that are available on every platform the site currently covers. Below, you will find reviews written by all eligible authors and sorted according to date of submission, with the newest content displaying first. As many as 20 results will display per page. If you would like to try a search with different parameters, specify them below and submit a new search.

Available Reviews
	Uncharted 2: Among Thieves review (PS3) Reviewed on January 11, 2010 If I learned anything from playing BioShock, it’s to be suspicious of any game that receives overwhelming praise for reasons that seem entirely unrelated to gameplay itself. Call Uncharted 2: Among Thieves a “cinematic” experience all you want, but that alone never would have sold it to me, because a game needs to function as a game to be worth my time. Let’s also take into consideration that the first Uncharted was – let’s face it – nothing special. I enjoyed it, sur...
	Blodia Land: Puzzle Quest review (NES) Reviewed on January 10, 2010 Blodia Land (BL) is a colorful, active slide-puzzler with the emphasis more on fun than abstract brain-crunching. Each level has a twisting path, which vanishes as the little lost dragon-duck walks forward. If the player shuffles tiles wrong, the dragon spins and dies. Eight diverse SMB-style maze worlds with ten-plus levels each and mini-games in dead-ends make for one of the most colorful, expansive puzzle games the NES has to offer.
	Castle Crashers review (X360) Reviewed on January 10, 2010 Castle Crashers is really neither new nor fresh, instead, it simply follows in the footsteps of past beat 'em up releases, like the two Dungeon & Dragons arcade titles and Guardian Heroes, where, besides beating up villains, you can have up to four gamers play, gain experience points, cast spells, shop at stores, and take alternative paths. Gameplay-wise, everything Castle Crashers does has already been done. However, I highly doubt the developers, The Behemoth, were aiming for ori...
	OutRun 2006: Coast 2 Coast review (PC) Reviewed on January 09, 2010 Realism is overrated. So many games strive to be realistic and claiming so is an exhausted marketing cliché. Arcades have decayed into an out of fashion commodity, where once an experience unseen in home consoles and arcade-quality graphics were a common marketing mantra. Since 3D graphics we’ve been able experience racing, flying, sports and battlefields almost for real almost leaving side-scrolling beat-em-ups and platformers passé.
	Great Deal review (NES) Reviewed on January 05, 2010 Great Deal combines Solitaire and Tetris into a nastily intriguing puzzle with its own quirks. The player picks one of a hand of four cards to drop on a five-by-five well. Three or more cards in a row of the same suit or number, or in a straight, disappear in a cloud of point values. The bigger, the better, and combos give multiples. A joker helps. One deck of cards makes a level.
	Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean review (GCN) Reviewed on January 04, 2010 Baten Kaitos' first few impressions are among its best. It begins with a series of flashbacks: a peaceful family scene at home, that same home engulfed in flames and invaded by sinister figures, ethereal petals coalescing to represent the bonding between human and otherworldly spirit. This tragic imagery, pregnant with intrigue, covered in film-grained sepia, and streaked by transparent vertical lines evocative of tears and raindrops, is subsequently juxtaposed with the natural hues of the charm...
	New Super Mario Bros. review (DS) Reviewed on January 04, 2010 With most modern games choosing to focus on today’s big trends, the occasional nostalgic title is (ironically) a breath of fresh air. It feels refreshing to have something that is not concerned with wowing you with cinematic presentation, providing a deep, complex story, and whatever other ideas and gimmicks the big games of today might contain.
	Zone of the Enders review (PS2) Reviewed on January 04, 2010 While most reviews are inclined to credit Zone of the Enders as the work of Hideo Kojima. His association is nothing more than an endorsement for the game rather than something you could truly consider as the mastermind of his work. Instead, the idea for the game came from one of Kojima's disciples. Zone of the Enders has the dubious honor of being called a Hideo Kojima game without much involvement from the man himself. His name only appeared twice during the ending credits...
	Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers review (PC) Reviewed on January 04, 2010 Gabriel Knight knows mystery. After all, he's a writer who has tried his hand at the literature genre. Unfortunately for him, much like most aspiring authors, the glory he had hoped for never materialized. With no promising career as an author, he has instead become the owner and proprietor of St. George's Rare Books, located in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Gabriel isn't a man to give up on his writing ambitions, however. When a rash of serial killings occurs in the city, Gabriel sets out ...
	Halo 3: ODST review (X360) Reviewed on January 04, 2010 Halo: Combat Evolved was almost a perfect game, until it tanked halfway through when the Flood showed up. For all of the praise the Halo series gets for ultra-intelligent AI, let’s keep in mind that it’s always been lousy AI that brings these games down: Bungie teases us by pitting us against the genuinely smart Covenant, only to then switch things up and unleash what are essentially fast-moving, mindless zombies in their place. And every game in the trilogy suffered because of it....
	inFAMOUS review (PS3) Reviewed on January 04, 2010 I believe rather strongly that moral choices are one of gaming’s most frequently abused clichés, and Infamous is one of the most prominent offenders. There’s the fact that our protagonist, Cole McGrath, is a standalone character who by and large doesn’t represent the player, resulting in a narrative that awkwardly tries to combine role-playing with third-person storytelling. There are the flow-breaking asides in which Cole mentally examines his choices, and there’s the fact that his two o...
	Indigo Prophecy review (PS2) Reviewed on January 03, 2010 Every once in a while there’s a game that’s destined to change things. Perhaps it’s the sort of game that heralds in a new engine, showcases a new standard of graphics, or brings in a unforeseen focus on story and settings. On the other side of the spectrum, there’s game so utterly bad they serve as a large sign to all future developers never, ever to design games in such a way. Often, these failures drown in pre-release hype, chosen to usher in a new age. At worst, a game that symbolizes the re...
	Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem review (GCN) Reviewed on January 03, 2010 The idea of survival horror is a fascinating one. While films are usually identified by aesthetic and emotive theme - fantasy, or action, or science-fiction - games tend to be categorised by activity. Do you shoot in this game? Then it's a shooting game. Do you strategise in it? Then it's a strategy. Videogame genre naming conventions leave very little room for thematics. Maybe that's to be expected. Games are, after all, primarily about doing stuff.
	American Dream review (NES) Reviewed on January 03, 2010 American Dream is the story of Pachio, a smiley little ball with hands and feet, who lands in America with $1000 and a goal of becoming obscenely rich. In the New York/New Jersey metropolitan area, with its casino, Pachio can get do just that without working or paying taxes! AD is littered with casinos chock full of positive-payout gambling machines. Navigating them leads to New Jersey, where Al Capone awaits...
	Machinarium review (PC) Reviewed on January 03, 2010 Adventure games suck. Let’s face it. They do. I’m not totally opposed to the idea of an adventure game being good, of course, but the inherent flaw of the genre is that they’re not about gameplay, and that undermines the very purpose of the medium, which is to be interactive entertainment. The few adventure games that have actually held my attention over the years, such as The Longest Journey or Grim Fandango, have done so because of an intriguing story, memorable characters, and c...
	Crackdown review (X360) Reviewed on January 02, 2010 For all of the negative things I’m about to say regarding Crackdown, I suppose it’s worth noting that in a modern gaming culture in which open-ended “sandbox” games have become a cliché, Crackdown stands out. It puts us in the shoes of a nameless government agent who can jump very high, and it places us in an enormous city with no shortage of tall buildings to climb. There is literally nowhere we can’t go from square one. As far as freedom goes – and sandbox games are all ab...
	Kengo: Legend of the 9 review (X360) Reviewed on December 31, 2009 For some time now, I've seen the words "realism" and "realistic" when players describe Kengo: Legend of the 9. I immediately think of the two Bushido Blade titles released for the original PlayStation whenever this happens. In those games, there's no life bars or stats of any kind, just two people on screen with swords. Any attack, any swing from either character could be the last. Matches would sometimes end seconds or drag on for minutes due to its realistic rules. While they weren't th...
	Uncharted: Drake's Fortune review (PS3) Reviewed on December 31, 2009 The more games like Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune I play, the more convinced I am that cover-based gunplay is simply becoming the norm, and that I should stop labeling these games “Gears of War clones.” It’s not like Epic are cursing other development teams for profiting from their idea after their own franchise tanked – this obviously is not the case – so let’s just accept the duck-and-cover system as the natural next step in the long-running shooter genre. That kind of optimism will...
	Jurassic Park: The Lost World review (ARC) Reviewed on December 31, 2009 I had a pleasant experience a little while ago: I was exploring a mall I’d never been to before, found an arcade, and located a running Jurassic Park: The Lost World machine. I hadn’t seen the light gun shooter since they removed it from the arcade near my own home years ago, and ever the victim of nostalgia, I decided to spend what I thought would be “just a few quarters” on it. Not only did I invest more time in the game than I’d anticipated, but I actually played alarmingly well, espec...
	The Orange Box review (PC) Reviewed on December 31, 2009 A year or two ago, I wrote a review for the console version of The Orange Box. In it, I threw around a few colorful adjectives for the first four games in the package, before coming to a halt with Team Fortress 2. I didn’t have Xbox Live at the time (and still don’t), and as such, I could merely say, “I haven’t really played this one, but I’ve heard it’s awesome, so there you go.” I have since spent more time with the PC rendition of Team Fortress 2 than nearly any other gam...

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