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.
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Rock Band 3 review (X360)Reviewed on December 22, 2011Rock Band 3 adopts a more complicated approach. You can start playing in a "Quick Play" mode, or you can go to a "Career" mode. Performance in one mode affects the options that you have in the other mode. Each song you play can earn you fans, and having enough fans allows you to increase the range of your tours, which eventually leads to more fame, more fans and more gear for your custom band. |
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NBA Jam review (WII)Reviewed on December 22, 2011When you play the new NBA Jam, the first thing you're likely to notice is that very little has changed. The team names aren't all the same, of course. There have been additions, removals and modifications that reflect the most recent activity in the league. There are no Seattle Supersonics now, for instance. The Charlotte Hornets have moved to New Orleans. |
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Mario Sports Mix review (WII)Reviewed on December 22, 2011You start fresh in each sport and you have to unlock every character and arena in each event. That means either playing 60 matches within that sport, which takes a lot of time, or it means playing through challenging hidden paths where the difficulty level is ratcheted up to an eventually absurd level that is made entirely too frustrating for most players within the game’s target audience because it’s so cheap. |
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Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light review (X360)Reviewed on December 22, 2011Besides puzzles, the game also offers a nearly perfect combat system. As Lara explores the fourteen stages in which her adventure unfolds, she'll do battle with all manner of monsters: gators, spiders, magicians, demons, skeletons and dinosaurs. She carries around a giant spear that she can toss repeatedly at her foes, her signature handguns and a whole arsenal of special weapons that she can acquire along the way. |
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Call of Duty: Black Ops review (X360)Reviewed on December 21, 2011In Call of Duty: Black Ops, you play an Australian actor named Sam Worthington doing a bad American accent while the serial killer from Saw forces him to yell stuff about the exposition, with occasional breaks to play through overloud overscripted overblown shooting galleries in which you get captured no fewer than three and a half times. |
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Dead Space 2 review (X360)Reviewed on December 21, 2011Storytelling aside (those are two words that this narrative-heavy game can't afford), Dead Space 2 is a serviceable two-trick pony. The main trick is the contrived dismemberment mode. Headshots are so passe. So the Dead Space approach is to encourage severing crab-like limbs, conveniently extended as if the monster was going to make a snow angel. They're loud, they writhe, they splorch out a lot of blood, and when you fail, they treat [sic] you to an elaborate animation of the lead character gruesomely dispatched. |
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Hard Reset review (PC)Reviewed on December 20, 2011Hard Reset isn't quite able to live up to the high standards of mayhem set by Serious Sam and Painkiller, but it gets enough right to be a lot of wrist-snapping fun. |
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Puzzler Mind Gym 3D review (3DS)Reviewed on December 19, 2011Puzzler Mind Gym 3D is the first brain training game for the Nintendo 3DS. What sets it apart from most other brain training games is that it’s a 90-day training regimen in which all 90 days are open and available to you right from the start. You can tackle as many sets of puzzles a day as you want, in whatever order you feel comfortable with. Early days are easier and later days are more difficult. |
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Assassin's Creed: Revelations review (X360)Reviewed on December 19, 2011Combat is still solid when it's one guy fighting a handful of enemies polite enough to hang back and wait their turns. But when Ubisoft tries larger encounters, which they do frequently in Revelations, Assassin's Creed combat looks suspiciously like Dynasty Warriors. That's not something to aspire to. When a riot breaks out, it looks unintentionally hilarious, with characters shuffling and bumping uncertainly. It looks more like a high school dance. |
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Fallout review (PC)Reviewed on December 17, 2011I’ve found Fallout to be enormously irritating. It’s a grotesquely unfriendly game. Its interface is convoluted and confusing. Wandering through the desert early on will almost certainly get you killed by foes you’re totally unequipped to defeat... yet wandering through the desert is the only way to progress. You can complete some fairly menial tasks in order to become strong enough to tackle them, but - well - they’re fairly menial. |
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Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening review (X360)Reviewed on December 16, 2011Meanwhile, you'll primarily be fighting the same stuff from Origins with a handful of new foes...and they just don't have the staying power to last through Awakening. In one dungeon, my guys were hacking down the formerly-feared Revenants like they were generic front-line infantry. Near the end of the game, a High Dragon attacks. The ensuing battle was a lot like when I fought a particular one back in Origins…except this time, I was the one kicking butt instead of the other way around. |
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Jurassic Park: The Game review (PC)Reviewed on December 16, 2011Fortunately, such exploration scenes are relatively few and far-between and there are no time constraints or other pressures rushing you along, so you won't be punished for awkwardness or missteps. What you will be punished for, at least once in awhile, is blowing the QTEs. But this actually turns out to be one of the game's highlights - watching the characters die in hilariously awful ways. |
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Green Day: Rock Band review (PS3)Reviewed on December 14, 2011Some of that personality is censored, unfortunately (or fortunately, if you're of the proper mind). When Harmonix released The Beatles: Rock Band, the company had the luxury of working with musical selections that the Vatican itself has endorsed. Green Day, in contrast, is comprised of three band members who like to talk about procreation in its most vulgar terms and who frequently protest organized religion and politics. |
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Mario Kart 7 review (3DS)Reviewed on December 09, 2011Mario Kart games have been headed in a cheap direction for awhile now, but the issue has been easy enough to ignore that its impact on the overall experience remained relatively minor. This is the first time that players have been forced to face it head-on if they want to get the most out of their brand new game. Mario Kart 7 is a good purchase for action racing fans, but it could have been one of the finest in the series if the development teams would have just realized that losing to a cheating game isn’t fun. |
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Dragon Age: Origins review (X360)Reviewed on December 09, 2011Don't get me wrong — I'm not saying the Darkspawn aren't a threat because they are (just saunter unprepared into an ambush of high-ranking ones for all the proof you need of that), but at least you know what you're getting with them — brutal, unreasoning aggression. That's a lot easier to deal with than the webs of half-truths and lies spun by the average member of Ferelden nobility. |
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Serious Sam: BFE review (PC)Reviewed on December 04, 2011Serious Sam 3: BFE is Croteam's love letter to those of us who have been waiting for another glimpse at classic shoot-'em-up-ery in the vein of Doom, Quake, and even the original Duke Nukem, whose modern iteration failed to deliver. It's a machine gun-and-heavy-metal symphony that only hardcore shooter fans will want to take a stab at, and while its punishing difficulty at times may certainly be a turnoff for potential buyers, it's a satisfying throwback to a simpler time. |
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Beyblade: Metal Masters review (DS)Reviewed on December 02, 2011The combat itself is barebones. Much of it is based on typical fighting convention stuff: position, sequence and timing. It’s all very basic. What’s important is to launch well and to use special attacks frequently. Each Beyblade has an associated power animal which factors into some combos and can be called upon for a seven-second cutscene in battle. There’s no option to turn these off (or even an options menu at all) and they’re never very good. They don’t even show the animal attack; allies just arrive and the screen goes white. |
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Anno 2070 review (PC)Reviewed on December 02, 2011The campaign, which has no time limits and almost no fail states, is just a primer. The core of Anno 2070 is the continuous scenario, which you can set up to be as competitive, goal-oriented, and punishing as you want, or as peaceful, open-ended, and forgiving as you want. This is the epitome of the sandbox game. Just start it up and build your little heart out. And the longer it goes, the longer you'll want it to go. |
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Tales of the Abyss review (PS2)Reviewed on December 02, 2011As you play, though, you'll notice a dark side to the powers that be relying on The Score as their be-all, end-all source of guidance; especially when it's made clear than a number of huge tragedies were caused by man solely to keep things in line with The Score. |
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GET TO THA CHOPPA TWOOO!!2 review (X360)Reviewed on November 29, 2011Get to tha Choppa Two‘s most remarkable aspect is how it takes a foundation, then, rather than build upon it, arms itself with a shovel and digs deeper into the muck. |
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