Posts tagged “Have You Played”

Protolife occupies a rather special place in my repository of tower defence games for two reasons. First, the central concept of controlling a little construction bot that poops out blue blocks in specific patterns to create all your defences. It's neat, it's elegant, and it places you into Protolife's world in a way that few games in this genre manage. Secondly, it's better than pretty…

Tagged with feature, Have You Played, Volcanic Giraffe, Protolife.

Many years ago, when I traipsed the streets of Belfast city with the menacing incisors of a 15-year-old who did not get braces when he should have done so, I often met with a pal and mentor in sub-criminal activities. Let’s call him "Firebastard". Firebastard was a good friend, and a knower of various clandestine arts. We all have that mate who downloaded The Anarchist’s…

Tagged with feature, Fellow Traveller, Have You Played, Team Fractal Alligator, Hacknet.

I love flying my tiny, insanely twisted shadow ship in Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet. Regardless of whether you like the rest of this 2D Metroidvania-y exploration game, the one thing you cannot fault is the feel and handling of your silhouetted space saucer. It's such a joyous thing to whizz around the screen, responding effortlessly to every key press with the elegance of a rocket-powered…

Tagged with feature, Have You Played, Shadow Planet Productions, Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet.

Frostpunk is a very pretty game about trying to build the last city on Earth after an icy global catastrophe. I, like many others, spent about 25% of my time giving orders to build and gather and research, and the other 75% of my time zooming in as far as the camera allowed to watch my miniature hooded citizens trudging through the snow, or clustered…

Tagged with 11 Bit Studios, feature, Have You Played, Frostpunk.

When Graham asked if you'd played Just Cause 2, he (correctly) spent most of his time praising the extent of its wanton destruction. Then he claimed that the multiplayer mod "lets you wreak the same havoc – and much more – in huge multiplayer servers." I don't think he realises how right he was.

Tagged with Avalanche Studios, feature, Have You Played, mod, Just Cause 2.

Duck Season was when VR clicked for me. Imagine what happens when you put Duck Hunt into VR, but made by some very twisted people. It takes some getting used to when it comes to shooting mallards with a shotgun, but as soon as you think you've got the knack of it, Duck Season has other ideas.

Tagged with feature, Have You Played, Stress Level Zero, Duck Season.

Another winter, another new Skyrim save file. You may be asking why I own this particular game on multiple different platforms, and sometimes more than once on one platform (looking at you Special Edition). You may think it’s because I like to create a different character build each time, a wise mage, a heavy melee warrior, or a stealthy archer. You may think it’s because…

Tagged with Bethesda Game Studios, Bethesda Softworks, Have You Played, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

Everything has conditioned us to expect that when we play as a superhero in a game, we're going to be thwarting some villain's plan, or preventing some great evil from occurring. But in SpeedRunners, you never actually get to that point. Instead, you're racing against other superheroes (all with remarkably similar powers...) in a desperate attempt to reach the scene of the crime first.

Tagged with doubledutch games, feature, Have You Played, tinyBuild, SpeedRunners.

For all its dreamy landscapes, talking robot toys and unusually high population of poisonous frogs, Papo & Yo is not a happy game. Based on designer Vander Callabero's own troubled childhood, Papo & Yo is very much in the same vein as games like That Dragon, Cancer and The Town of Light - hard-hitting, true-to-life stories that use the game as a lens to tackle…

Tagged with feature, Have You Played, Minority Media.

Crash Bandicoot N.Sane Trilogy is one of many cases where I've seen the internet lose their collective marbles. From the review that compared it to Dark Souls, to the complaints about the High Road, this much-anticipated re-imagining of the original Crash Bandicoot games became less of a celebration of what came before, and more of a battleground where people would rant about those two subjects…

Tagged with Actiivision, feature, Have You Played, Vicarious Visions, Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy.

It's always sad when a promising indie dev goes under. The latest is Ultra Ultra, a Copenhagen-based outfit whose first (and last) game was Echo, a stealthy-actiony-horror-ish type game where a croaky-throated young woman travels to an ornate, planet-sized palace in order to try to revive a long-lost friend she's carrying around in a red cube on her back. Oh, and it's also full of…

Tagged with feature, Have You Played, Ultra Ultra, Echo.

Tremors, but a game. You are a big sand worm, like the slithering giant in Dune, and your goal is to eat the poor folk of Egypt and their camels (or another applicable country). Then you grow. You eat their jeeps. Their soldiers. Their helicopters. Death Worm is the straightforward game of ye olde Centipede made into something twice as vicious, but just as simple.

Tagged with feature, Have You Played, Death Worm.

I've never been one for Twin Peaks, I'm afraid, and I know Virginia gets compared to that a lot. It's a small town with a cast of small town people. Weird stuff is happening. You're an FBI agent. You drink coffee in the diner. You get it. And none of that is really what I like about Virginia.

Tagged with 505 Games, feature, Have You Played, Variable State, Virginia.

Often, games are burnt into our memories by the light of the events that took place offscreen. Sometimes, the fused structures are happy ones: a snatch of music from Sonic 3 brings with it the smell of cut grass and caravan upholstery, while the cover art for Discworld II dredges up midsummer sweat and wafting net curtains, the night before a family holiday.

Tagged with Chucklefish, feature, Have You Played, Starbound.

Project Hospital is a very realistic hospital game that looks a lot like Habbo. But the problem is, hospitals aren’t very fun places to be, are they? Which is why games like Two Point Hospital make them humorous and less realistic, because depending on the reason you’re in hospital, they tend to exist for bad things, right? Not always, I mean you could be having…

Tagged with Have You Played, Oxymoron Games, Project Hospital.

Ah, fickle memory, what nebulous relic have you brought me today? Ah yes, Olive Wars. I remember Olive Wars. You played as an olive, and you fought in a valiant war. Your enemies were the airborne vegetables of contempt. Broccoli, tomato, peppers, avocado. The vegetables of the skies. They must be brought down. Yes, memory, you have brought me a good nugget of pointless wonder…

Tagged with feature, Have You Played, The Code Zone, Olive Wars.

How many dead kings is too many dead kings? That's the question at the heart of The Witcher 2: Assassins Of Kings. I mean, the clue's in the title. Perhaps the bigger question is, will you join the ranks of the titular monarch manglers? And it's a doozy of a question. In a world already destabilised by a rush of regicides, what happens when one…

Tagged with CD Projekt Red, feature, Geralt, Have You Played, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings.

Before Tequila Works set about tugging heartstrings in their wistful puzzle-platformer Rime, they were full-on wrenching them out of your chest in their gritty zombie-platformer Deadlight. An odd origin story, perhaps, for a studio that's now mostly known for their bright, colourful artwork and raw, emotional sucker punches, but Deadlight was very much a product of its time. When Telltale's The Walking Dead was at…

Tagged with feature, Have You Played, Tequila Works, Deadlight, Deadlight: Director's Cut.

When I was a young lad, I primarily played on the Sega Mega Drive. Normally, my brother would be the one to introduce new games to the house, but Earthworm Jim was the first game I remember buying on my own without outside interference. I'd read about it prior to release in Sonic the Comic, of all things. Here was a colourful platformer that came from…

Tagged with feature, Have You Played, interplay, Shiny Entertainment, earthworm jim.

SteamWorld Heist is about one thing, and one thing only. Some will tell you it's a highly accomplished turn-based strategy game that somehow plays out magnificently across a 2D plane, while others will say it's all about the joy of lining up the perfect shot to destroy hard-to-reach space pirates in their randomly generated space ships. But they are wrong. SteamWorld Heist is about hats,…

Tagged with feature, Have You Played, Image & Form, SteamWorld Heist.