Wayward Souls is an action role-playing game in the mould of Nintendo (NES & SNES) classics like Secret of Mana and Legend of Zelda. It also manages to incorporate elements from that most voguish of retro formats, the roguelike.
Most first-person games immediately stick a gun in the bottom part of your screen. Developers seem to believe that the only exciting agency a player has in virtual worlds is to destroy them and kill the people populating them. A Story About My Uncle joins a small, but growing band of first-person games that ditch the shooting, for the better.
On technical grounds, it's pretty hard as a gamer not to simply be amazed by Modern Combat 5 – it is, pretty much, a fully-functioned, first-person shooter to rival Call Of Duty and Battlefield, only on your phone rather than a dedicated home console.
That's not just talking in terms of visuals – although they're the most immediately impressive thing about the game. As well as the graphics, there's the amount of single-player missions, the multi-player and the plethora of side-quests, weapons upgrades and loadout options available also.
Minecraft Pocket Edition has been around on Android and iOS since late 2011 and is still officially an alpha release. After a couple of years of slow development, version 0.9.0 arrived this month and finally turned the portable Minecraft into something worth reviewing - and playing.
The videogames industry is changing, and not in a good way. There are fewer and fewer people creating single-player stories of depth and ingenuity in games. The sad truth is fewer and fewer people are willing to pay enough (or anything even) for games that are artistic, slower or deeper. Instead, videogames are increasingly falling into one of two woeful categories.
A minus mark for this puzzle game for cannily, if cheesily, being named to hitch a ride on the wildly-popular MineCraft phenomenon. And another minus mark for its barely-a-concept-at-all of mashing together two massively enjoyable and enduring puzzle game series into one.
MouseCraft takes the block shapes from Tetris - literally the exact same block shapes: the square one, the S-shaped one, the long-thin one, the L-shaped one – and adds them to a very slightly reworked version of Lemmings.
Sometimes, if you get really proficient at a game you might be lucky enough to enter the psychological state known as "flow", where you become so focused and at one with the task in hand that time seems to compress, everything starts to feel just right and the game could almost be said to be playing you. You are in the zone. Some games more than others seem to actively invite players into this special place, and Fluid SE* practically demands that you jump in with both feet if you are to have any chance at all.
Sometimes virtual violence can simply be fun, even morally dubious violence. Sniper Elite III is pretty reprehensible and fairly morally indefensible. It gleefully glamorises violence. Yet throughout, it's fun. Really good fun.
To the casual (if veteran) gamer, Kiwanuka resembles the Nineties classic Lemmings in how it tasks you with guiding a group of tiny charaters to safety across a screen full of rocky 2D platforms.
A detective ghost story with virtually no violence – Murdered: Soul Suspect is an odd construction. It is part point-and-click adventure game, part interactive fiction and part stealth-adventure – none of which are massively successful elements.
While investigating The Bell Killer, a serial killer working his way throughSalem,Massachusetts, your clichéd cop comes off the worse for an encounter. Thrown out of a high window, then shot, you come to as a ghost. Now, in order to be head off into the light, you must find out who your killer is.