Review Archives (Staff Reviews)

You are currently looking through staff 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
	Resident Evil 5 review (X360) Reviewed on March 17, 2009 Throughout the first chapter — while trying to escape an entire city that hated me, while hiding in dark corners and climbing walls to escape the bloodthirsty masses — Resident Evil 5 provided a heart-pounding, frightening, and thoroughly playable adventure with some disturbing real-world implications. I knew these people weren't evil, just sick... but I killed them anyway. I had to kill them to survive — they were bursting through ceilings, climbing through windows, hiding behind fences. By the end, I was shooting everyone on sight, and feeling pleasure. Heaven help me if there was an actual innocent soul wandering the streets.
	Blue Dragon Plus review (DS) Reviewed on March 16, 2009 Blue Dragon Plus is ultimately too well-designed an RTS to allow for the most basic strategies, but at the same time, it doesn’t offer the most complex, either. Simply grouping all of your units together and rushing mindlessly from one encounter to the next often won’t cut it, especially when the difficulty escalates in the latter half of the adventure. At the same time, attempting to formulate any advanced strategies, trying to really make the most of your available unis, will result in aggravation.
	Grand Ages: Rome review (PC) Reviewed on March 16, 2009 Grand Ages: Rome is made by the same developers and initially could be mistaken to be the same game as IR. The strict attention to detail is still prevalent, as is the fluid economy and employment system. The one big thing that GA introduces is more variation. With its predecessor, it was easy to apply the same strategy to every map – maps which were all too similar to one another. The obvious aim of its spiritual sequel is to mix things up a little. This is something that's prominent from first play-through.
	Fenimore Fillmore's Revenge review (PC) Reviewed on March 16, 2009 Missing the mark in everything it tries to achieve, Fenimore Fillmore's Revenge is a catastrophe of an adventure game. Thoughtlessly designed and amateurishly crafted, it quickly descends into a pile of pointless gibberish and unfinished ideas. Fortunately, it's so insignificant that it's not worth getting upset about. If you're stupid enough to play it, make sure you disconnect your speakers first.
	Killzone 2 review (PS3) Reviewed on March 14, 2009 Because the game rewards you for playing, you never feel that your time and efforts are being wasted. “So I got my ass handed to me and only made 10 kills in an hour," you might think. "Big deal. That’s still 10 kills closer to my next rank.” With that said, you'll never just have 10 kills in a match of Killzone 2. The game is designed for heavy casualties. It’s not uncommon to get over a hundred kills in a single match.
	Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People Episode 5: 8 Bit is Enough review (PC) Reviewed on March 14, 2009 All in all, it's a pretty great ride, but it's somewhat telling that even Strong Bad seems bored when you go to pick up the metal detector and shovel for the fifth time. There's plenty of more standard and less inventive ambling about which I admit has gotten a little old by the fifth game. The game is still short, and only flirting with the fringes of frustration by the end. Episode 5 is easily the best game in the series, but it's probably a good thing that they're taking a break after this one, at least for a little while.
	Tenchu: Shadow Assassins review (WII) Reviewed on March 13, 2009 Tenchu: Shadow Assassins may very well be the return of developers Acquire to the franchise, but this Wii title falls flat on its poorly conceived digital face. It’s little more than an antiquated stealth game with tacked-on motion controls.
	The Path review (PC) Reviewed on March 12, 2009 As a concept, The Path is a brave attempt at something more poignant within the medium. As a game, it's a collection of excellent yet slightly incomplete ideas. As a talking point, it provides more ground for intelligent game-related discussion than anything else is likely to encourage this year. So let's talk about it. And let's keep making more games like this.
	Supreme Ruler 2020 review (PC) Reviewed on March 12, 2009 Supreme Ruler: 2020 is exactly what I adore: a strat title nearly unapproachable due to its level of depth, but promising months upon months of diverse enjoyment. I do so love a challenge.
	Penumbra: Requiem review (PC) Reviewed on March 11, 2009 After Black Plague so masterfully refined the Penumbra format, it seems like such a waste to throw it all away in favour of a poorly contextualised and badly designed puzzle game. Requiem resolutely fails in every aspect that made its predecessors so remarkable. The game that was never meant to be made should have stayed that way.
	Penumbra: Black Plague review (PC) Reviewed on March 11, 2009 Everything's received an overhaul. Black Plague looks better, sounds better, plays better and reads better than its predecessor. It's still slightly rough around the edges, as is inevitible for a game built on such a tight budget by such a small team of developers. But it's less clumsy, more restrained, and more effective than before.
	Soldier of Fortune: Payback review (X360) Reviewed on March 09, 2009 Soldier of Fortune's protagonist is a bloodthirsty killer who has no intention of ever retiring from battle. He just wants to pop heads and rend limbs with grenade launchers and assault rifles (most of which are picked up off the ground, since it's nearly impossible to find ammo for your own weapons). This game has acquired a violent reputation, and deservedly so... but much of the gore is obscured by muted backdrops.
	Mount & Blade review (PC) Reviewed on March 06, 2009 Really, it's just a matter of what you want. Anyone with the right mindset and a pinch of imagination can get swept away in the world of Mount and Blade, and create something that is unique and epic to them. That one aspect, in spite of any of its faults, kept me playing for hours. If you like having your hand held, and being given direction and taken through a story, then the game's not for you.
	Water Closet: The Forbidden Chamber review (PC) Reviewed on March 05, 2009 The moral of Water Closet must be: even if it seems repulsive at first, pissing and pooping in public is fun. Personally, I prefer to be regarded with reverence and admiration instead of shame and repulsion. That probably means I'm not in the game's target audience. Would you care to play?
	Ceville review (PC) Reviewed on March 05, 2009 Despite its good intentions, Ceville is so mediocre that I'm struggling to know what to say about it. It's easy to enthuse about brilliance in games, or relentlessly rant about awful bits. Ceville has no significant examples of either. Despite its good intentions, it's unremarkable; despite its problems, it's rather playable. It sits firmly in the middle of the gaming spectrum, a title that's likely to annoy few but resonate with fewer.
	F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin review (X360) Reviewed on March 05, 2009 Refined, often impressive, yet ultimately empty, there's simply none of Monolith's renowned creativity on display here. Producing a more polished version of your four-year-old near-masterpiece doesn't quite cut it, in a world where the genre is rapidly maturing and evolving into a new beast altogether.
	Secret Wives' Club review (PC) Reviewed on March 05, 2009 Now instead of simply clicking through a bunch of text and making the occasional decision, you're asked to make choices from a menu. The three women you hope to "educate" are each assigned columns. Your goal is to please all three of the horny vixens. Each has numerous scenes from which to choose, all divided into categories for your convenience. Mostly, these relate to the state of the relationship and predict how things are about to go so that you can decide where to budget your time.
	TrackMania DS review (DS) Reviewed on March 05, 2009 The DS version doesn’t do a very good job at selling itself. More on that later, though, because while at first I suspected that Trackmania was going to be collecting dust on my shelf alongside Trace Memory and Lost in Blue, I have found myself playing it every night without fail.
	Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon review (DS) Reviewed on March 04, 2009 Spend a few hours with any Fire Emblem game and you’ll see why the series is revered in the world of turn-based strategy games: Its emphasis on the immediate and long-term effects of death is brilliant. The knowledge that each downed soldier is down for good makes you more considerate of individual lives. Being more considerate, in turn, makes you more cautious, less reckless. You come out of a Fire Emblem game a better player than you were when you entered.
	Prinny: Can I Really Be the Hero? review (PSP) Reviewed on March 01, 2009 Rather than working to avoid such situations, the developers do their best to replicate them numerous times throughout each zone. Stages seem to have been built specifically to trick you into making mistakes. You'll find moving platforms that look like they should require a double jump, only to to realize too late that they actually don't. Or you'll leap across a wide gap only to immediately run into a wall of waiting projectiles that you couldn't possibly have anticipated. Fireballs often come out of nowhere. Enemies materialize from thin air. Monsters float down from above when you had no idea they were even there. Too much of the experience comes down to tedious trial and error.

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