Review Archives (Staff Reviews)

You are currently looking through staff reviews for PC games. Below, you will find reviews written by all eligible authors and sorted according to date of submission, with the oldest 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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	Drawn: The Painted Tower review (PC) Reviewed on October 07, 2009 For people who haven't played an adventure game before, this title could serve as a decent starting point and a solid representation of its genre, but unfortunately there's not much on offer for the more hardcore adventure fan.
	Tales of Monkey Island: Chapter 3 - Lair of the Leviathan review (PC) Reviewed on October 08, 2009 The simplicity of most of the tasks means Lair of the Leviathan ends up being a little shorter than the rest of Tales thus far, but it's not really an issue when the episode feels so well directed, tight and polished. It's the most solid of the series, certainly, and if Telltale can maintain this level of quality while ramping the humour back up to its highest standards, the final two episodes might as well set sail for the shores of greatness.
	CustomPlay Golf 2010 review (PC) Reviewed on October 20, 2009 It’s by no means perfect, but by catering to the ground planners at home and making their efforts freely available, it offers something commendable and, perhaps more importantly, recommendable.
	Zeno Clash review (PC) Reviewed on October 20, 2009 In a lot of ways, it feels like an evolved Double Dragon comfortably shoehorned into the first perspective then bottle fed LSD by the gallon.
	Madballs in... BABO: Invasion review (PC) Reviewed on October 20, 2009 Overall, Madballs is an enjoyable game for a while, especially at the $10 price point. However, it is not greater than the sum of its individual parts. If you want to play either a great shooter or a great platformer, there are other games that do it better at the same price range (have a look at Geometry Wars and Marble Blast Ultra). That being said, if you really want to do both at the same time, you could certainly be worse off, as the cartoony approach and style is charming enough to entertain, if only for a short while.
	Gemini Lost review (PC) Reviewed on October 21, 2009 With infinite resources you might think that this game is a builder’s paradise, but unfortunately it’s not. Surprisingly, while the game gives you the freedom to collect as many resources as you want, it does not give you the freedom to build as much as you want. Aside from multiple houses, the game only allows one building of each type in predetermined spaces on the map, which usually means that you will accumulate wood and stone in your stockpile by the hundreds with no use for them.
	Adam's Venture: The Search for the Lost Garden review (PC) Reviewed on October 24, 2009 There’s not many locations you can squeeze into two hours, so they’ve all been gussied up accordingly. It’s only when the slightly subtle motifs of beating back darkness with your light are replaced by silver-tongued snakes and comments about how disaster befell the last woman to eat an apple in the Garden of Eden that you start forgetting it’s meant to be a game and start to wonder when you’re going to be told that when the Rapture comes, you’re going to be the first to die.
	The Colonel's Bequest review (PC) Reviewed on October 26, 2009 Greed. Sex. Murder. Yes, The Colonel's Bequest has all the good things in life. It's even set in the heart of the Roaring Twenties, but unfortunately for the lovely Laura Bow there won't be any time for bootleg hooch or the devil's jazz. Our spunky flame haired sleuth instead finds herself surrounded by an ever dwindling cast of shifty suspects on Colonel Henri Dijon's crumbling bayou plantation, because nothing livens up a creepy old house quite like death.
	Aion: The Tower of Eternity review (PC) Reviewed on October 30, 2009 A persistent question throughout both Aion's beta and the early days of live was "Will this game kill WoW?" It popped up in the world chat channel more often than "Can I borrow 10 gold?" That by itself is pretty mind blowing, but really, it's a stupid question. No, Aion is not going to kill World of Warcraft. No game coming out in the foreseeable future is going to knock WoW from its throne, but that's the wrong question to ask anyway. Why should it need to?
	Order of War review (PC) Reviewed on November 02, 2009 If you like your RTS games simple, then this game is for you.
	Restaurant Empire 2 review (PC) Reviewed on November 05, 2009 What challenges await my Restaurant Empire next month? Liquor licenses and dumb waiters that cost an arm and a leg, but net long-term profits? Hiring additional staff and firing problem employees? Optimizing seating and serving paths for best results? From the looks of it, yes.
	Majesty 2: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim review (PC) Reviewed on November 15, 2009 Earlier this year I previewed Majesty 2. Back then I praised its novelty and commented on how the revolutionary management system could signal a whole new type of simulation-strategy game. There were moments where I felt like a massively multiplayer community director – assigning quests and handing out rewards to heroes. This made the title drastically different to other titles in the same genre and a pleasure to play. The whole preview was based on the concept that you don't truly control your kingdom's inhabitants and instead you recruit them at specifically-designed guilds. Then you simply allow them to roam free around the land. I found this to be a fascinating element and was the key reason behind me enjoying the beta so much. This unique feel has thankfully been carried through to the full version.
	Tales of Monkey Island: Chapter 4 - The Trial and Execution of Guybrush Threepwood review (PC) Reviewed on November 17, 2009 It’s rarely a chore to play through. The short length helps that, and the restrictive nature of the game world and its neatly intertwined objectives only contributes to the tightness. It raises plenty of smiles. But when it’s essentially becoming the same episode stuck on repeat ad nauseum, how much praise is it reasonable to lavish?
	Fallen Earth review (PC) Reviewed on November 20, 2009 Easily dismissed at first glance as a Massively Multiplayer Fallout clone, no simple comparison can really do Fallen Earth justice.
	Tropico 3 review (PC) Reviewed on December 02, 2009 A city building game that adds enough new gameplay elements to make it stand out of the crowd.
	Return to Mysterious Island 2: Mina's Fate review (PC) Reviewed on December 12, 2009 Despite a couple of hiccups, Return to Mysterious Island 2 does enough of the important things right to deliver a unique and slightly nostalgic experience, and is sufficiently different from its older sibling to justify its place on the fence between Sequel and Expansion.
	Syberia review (PC) Reviewed on January 16, 2010 Syberia tricks you with subtlety on a drip feed: the game’s focus, aim and characters all change so naturally over time that it’s not until you’ve worked your way to the end that you can look back over the whole picture and understand just how well realised the entire experience was.
	Star Wars: The Force Unleashed - Ultimate Sith Edition review (PC) Reviewed on January 17, 2010 It's hard enough dealing with an action game that switches into "surprise bullet time" at the drop of a hat, yet the game's shockingly sluggish performance is far from its only problem. Graphical glitches abound, ranging from the merely annoying to outright show-stoppers. Doors, computer consoles and other objects will occasionally flicker or disappear outright, although they remain solid enough to impede the player's movement. More seriously, in one instance a platform I was required to move with my Force powers also went missing, leaving me unable to progress through the game until, after several futile, frustrating minutes and a quick Google to make sure I wasn't completely off-base about what I was supposed to be doing, I exited and restarted the game.
	The Treasures of Montezuma 2 review (PC) Reviewed on January 21, 2010 You'll likely spend most of your time in said Adventure mode, both because you're initially compelled to do so and because the developers were wise enough to include rewards for working your way through its individual stages. Each success in that mode results in some in-game currency that you can use to purchase upgrades as you progress through the subsequent stages, ensuring that you have reason to keep playing at least for the first 10 hours or so. Once purchased, the upgrades activate if you manage to clear certain icons from the board, or if you eliminate pieces from the same color twice in a row.
	Torchlight review (PC) Reviewed on January 27, 2010 To its credit, Torchlight is much more than just a cash-in on our nostalgia. As much as it is an homage to its diabolic predecessor, Torchlight easily stands on its own as a game. Rather than using those familiar Diablo elements as a crutch, it takes those elements and gives them just enough of a twist to make them fresh again.

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