gaming
Simon Munk
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.Sniper Elite's key selling point, the thing that defines the series above all else, is a repellent, yet hypnotic, slow-motion kill-cam. Improved for the latest game, it shows your long-range bullet entering through skin, muscle, sinew; shattering through bone; destroying internal organs before leaving your Nazi enemy writing in agony on the ground, before expiring in Read more ...
Simon Munk
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.As a ghost, of course, you no longer have access to guns Read more ...
Simon Munk
Heralded as the first true "next-generation" videogame, Watch Dogs has either been hugely overhyped or the imaginative leap required for a true new generation of videogaming is entirely absent from mainstream games. Because this cyberpunk-inflected hacking action-adventure offers virtually nothing new.The original Deus Ex in 2000 remains the template for combining dystopian science fiction themes, multi-angled approaches to missions and cyberpunk human augmentation and hacking. This simply attempts to mix that formula with the huge open world and freeroaming chaos of Grand Theft Auto V and Read more ...
Simon Munk
Videogames aesthetics are often misleading. There are many examples of beautiful games that have no artistic merit, emotional heft or ludological interest. There are also many examples of ugly games that grip utterly. Of course, the ideal is both simultaneously – and Transistor almost does that.On visuals, its beautiful Steampunk setting is wonderfully realised. This, combined with exemplary character and narrative design, delicately draws you into a floating city and the story of Red and her sword/partner Transistor. She, silent fury and constant movement; he a disembodied voice revealing Read more ...
Simon Munk
It's time to talk about time travel. The fourth dimension, as time is sometimes called, represents fertile ground for videogames designers. After all, the shift from side-scrolling two-dimensions (move left, right, jump up, fall down) to three was a huge leap.Three dimensional playing fields enabled first-person perspectives, freeroaming adventure and more. Adding a fourth dimension, letting you transform the game around your actions, can be an exciting way to turn gaming on its head. The independent hit Braid proved that. Unfortunately now every game that dabbles with time travel has to walk Read more ...
Simon Munk
There are many admirable things about Child Of Light. It's the game that the core team behind Far Cry 3 – the mega-action, gnarly dude first-person shooter ‑ went on to work on next. Yet, it's difficult to imagine two games further from each other.In Child Of Light, you play Aurora – a princess who falls into a deathly sleep to wake up in a dreamworld dominated by darkness. To return to her grieving father in the real world, she must defeat a wicked queen there. Able to fly, followed by a glowing, controllable orb of light and floating her way through a beautifully detailed landscape of giant Read more ...
Simon Munk
Superheroes and videogames should be a match made in heaven – the primary colour characterisations; the non-stop action and combat; the backstories sketched on a napkin, but then gradually filled in over multiple issues; the superpowers, analogous to classic videogame "power-ups". It's strange then, that videogame superheroes have had such a tough time of it in general.It's also strange to see this third edition in the series floundering so badly in the wake of two inventive and original games that flamboyantly and successfully mixed freeroaming city exploration and action reminiscent of the Read more ...
Simon Munk
Flow states – experienced by athletes, religious zealots and videogamers playing Titanfall. This explosive action game is the most eagerly anticipated and hyped-up videogame of the "next generation" console war so far. It could singlehandedly transform Microsoft's slow start for its new Xbox One console. And while being deeply dull and reactionary in many ways, it encourages a gaming flow state of constant fun like little else in some time.In Titanfall two off-world factions vie for control of a planet. Both are armed to the teeth, not just with conventional weaponry, but giant "Titan" Read more ...
Simon Munk
Thief is the reboot of one of the oldest, and smartest of the stealth-action gaming series. Of course, as is customary in modern videogame design, the gameplay's been somewhat dumbed down. But it's not fatal here – leaving a stealthy and stylish successor that's a touch too repetitive.The Thief trilogy, which ran from 1998 to 2004, was a hugely influential set of stealth-action games. Splinter Cell and Dishonored, for instance, both owe a huge debt to the series' light and shadow-based stealth gameplay. But the series was difficult to master and slow in pace – with players required to Read more ...
Simon Munk
Dracula, the ultimate symbol of undead power, mystery and evil. As the anti-hero in this action-adventure sequel to the excellent Lords Of Shadow, you'd hope this would make for an epic adventure, or at least some toothsome plotting. Instead we get an enfeebled, old man as main character, a meandering, over-complex plot with ill-judged shock factor elements and far too many dull sections to plod through. It makes Twilight look like The Hunger or Near Dark in comparison.Dracula awakens from a long sleep weak and feeble in the modern world. In order to end his cursed immortality, a MacGuffin Read more ...
Simon Munk
"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold..." thus begins Hunter S Thompson's seminal Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. And the spirit of that book and HST's surreal "gonzo" take on reality live on in this oddball "comedy adventure game set in an alternate-reality Cold War World, plagued with Corporate Espionage, CyberCrime™ and Sentient Martinis."It was when the boss took a trip to the "wine cellar" after handing Agent Polyblank his pill to start the first espionage mission, the boss promptly proceeding to climb under his desk and go to sleep Read more ...
Simon Munk
You are staring at your computer screen; you are literally you. And now, through the wonder of modern technology, you can jump into the mind of, and take over, the security head of a near-future corporation's flying fortress. You control his speech, movements, decisions. That's how Consortium starts.You jump into Bishop 6's head just as he wakes up for his first shift on the Zenlil plane/fortress of the global Consortium security force. The game uses Bishop 6's status as new kid, and your status as new kid inside Bishop 6, to toy with you throughout.Other staff onboard regularly ask you Read more ...