Posts tagged “Have You Played”

Tagged with Arkane Studios, Bethesda, feature, Have You Played, Dishonored 2.

It was a real surprise to me when Planet Zoo started to truly click. It doesn't happen often, with games this high on the complexity ladder. There's such an incredible amount of stuff to learn about Planet Zoo, not just about the running of the zoo itself and the needs and desires of every animal, but also the remarkably powerful building tools available to the…

Tagged with feature, Frontier Developments, Have You Played, Planet Zoo.

OK, I know this is my second Have You Played…? to find an excuse to start by talking about Age Of Empires 2, and I imagine Alice Bee is making a proper wolf noise out of frustration as she edits this. I am almost sorry. But like a smug schoolboy proclaiming he’s "home" in a game of "it" by touching a tree, I've got a…

Tagged with feature, Have You Played, Mohawk Games, Offworld Trading Company.

The Blackwell series began in 2006, a collection of 5 proper good point and click games featuring a girl and a ghost solving paranomal-ish mysteries. The Blackwell Epiphany is the finale of them, and is actually the first Blackwell game I ever played.

Tagged with feature, Have You Played, Wadjet Eye Games, The Blackwell Epiphany.

Spore is several games in one, none of which are particularly impressive on their own. It's life sim meets strategy, where you grow a tiny organism with a little snappy mouth into a horrible monstrosity you made look like a penis because you’re hilarious. Eventually that penis will become a spacefaring species trying to traverse and spread throughout the galaxy.

Tagged with feature, Have You Played, Maxis, Spore.

Ah, the internet. It might be a cesspool of fibre optic-fuelled hate and anxiety these days, but back in ye olde dial-up times of 1999 it felt like a new frontier of hot information. It was a place where people were just trying to share their art, thoughts, music and other assorted paraphernalia with like-minded folk half way across the globe, and where today's trolls…

Tagged with feature, Have You Played, No More Robots, Tendershoot, Hypnospace Outlaw.

Plague Inc: Evolved is a game about killing off the human race with a disease. Billions of human beings are boiled down to numbers of healthy, infected, and dead, allowing players to neatly sidestep the potential well of moral turmoil that such subject matter invites (especially in these times), and instead focus on evolving their plague. It's a fairly challenging little strategy game that can…

Tagged with feature, Have You Played, Ndemic Creations, Plague Inc: Evolved.

I have often related how, whilst covering E3 2018 from the UK, I was watching Bethesda's live show at some ungodly hour in the morning, having not slept for some days because of watching other live shows at ungodly hours in the morning, and suddenly Andrew W.K. happened.He and his band absolutely crushing Ready To Die (Mr. W.K. proving he is indeed a very accomplished…

Tagged with Avalanche Studios, Bethesda Softworks, feature, Have You Played, id Software, Rage 2.

All the world's a stage, as some idiot once said. This is literally true in Knee Deep, an adventure-slash-mystery game set in weirdo small town Cypress Knee, but that plays out on a large theatre stage. The locations are all bits of set. They rotate in and out. The walls drop away. It's fun.

Tagged with feature, Have You Played, Prologue Games, Knee Deep.

In strategy games that cover broad swathes of human history, it’s always a bit sad that the Stone Age is, at best, an early game sideshow – something to be breezed past in a couple of technological leaps on the way to better things. Not so with Dawn Of Man, which concentrates on the various something-lithic periods to the exclusion of everything else. In this…

Tagged with feature, Have You Played, Madruga Works, Dawn of Man.

I love Frontier’s trio of park-building games, but they are strange beasts. All three (that’s Planet Coaster, Planet Zoo, and Jurassic World Evolution, for the record) are slightly shallower management games than I usually tend to enjoy, but they make up for it with severe overperformance in every other regard.

Tagged with feature, Frontier Developments, Have You Played, Jurassic World Evolution.

You all remember Her Story, right? The video-clip detective game that launched a thousand FMVs, none of which were quite as good as Her Story? Developer Sam Barlow followed up with Telling Lies, which is another video-clip detective game that is probably not quite as good as Her Story - though it is much more polished.

Tagged with feature, Have You Played, Sam Barlow.

I was so disappointed the first time I saw the credits roll in Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes. I'd heard it was short before I booted it up, but I don't think I knew how short. Where were my oddly-timed codec conversations about how Jack met Rose? Why didn't I have to climb a giant ladder while an acapella version of the theme faintly…

Tagged with feature, Have You Played, Kojima Productions, Konami, Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes.

Nioh might be my favourite soulslike game (alongside its big brother Nioh 2), because it twists Miyazaki’s wonder formula into an action RPG that’s more akin to Diablo than Dark Souls.

Tagged with feature, Have You Played, Koei Tecmo, Team Ninja, Nioh.

Obviously, it's wonderful when you plan out airtight approaches and execute them without breaking a sweat, but that isn't true joy. Hitman happiness is found in plan B, when you have to react to the mistakes you've made and the situations you've put Agent 47 in. Sure, being spotted by someone and discovering that your only defence is a squeaky toy you've stuffed into your…

Tagged with feature, Have You Played, IO Interactive, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, Hitman 2.

The only reason I know the name of Prototype 2’s protagonist (Sgt. James… hang on, let me be sure… yeah, Sgt. James Heller) is because I just Googled it. I think the story involved the playable goodie from the first game turning bad and infecting people with some type of supervillian zombie disease. Also your wife… and daughter (?) are dead.

Tagged with Activision, feature, Have You Played, radical-entertainment, Prototype 2.

Ritual Of The Moon is an unusual game. Similar to The Longing, it has a real time element to it, although with Ritual Of The Moon it is more specific. You see, the Ritual Of The Moon has to be played once a day, every day, for 28 days, in order to complete it. Oh ho ho, you can see where this is going.

Tagged with feature, Have You Played, Kara Stone, Ritual Of The Moon.

I love watching the ecstasy of an athlete who's just realised they’ve won gold at the Olympics. It’s a very special moment. I bet all gold medallists have an annual swanky dinner or something, where they swill Lucozade and delicately spoon energy gel into their mouths. Maybe it’s time I went along. I mean, I beat the World’s Hardest Game over ten years ago. Let…

Tagged with feature, Have You Played, Snubby Land, Stephen Critoph, World's Hardest Game.

Whomst among us hasn't got absolutely bladdered and woken up the next day having lost all of their uniform and with no idea what happened the night before? Well me; I haven't done that. But I am not Tondbert, the plucky protagonist of retro-style point and click adventureGuard Duty. Tondbert's drunken lapse in judgement has resulted in his kingdom's princess being kidnapped, which is not…

Tagged with Digital Tribe Games, feature, Have You Played, Sick Chicken Studios, Guard Duty.

In Stacking, you're too small to do what you need to do. You can often be two or three people too small. To solve the game's puzzles, you're forced to assume the identities of some bigger people by donning their wooden skin. It sounds a little like a Castor Troy wet dream, but it's much sweeter than anything that fella thinks of when he goes…

Tagged with Double Fine Productions, feature, Have You Played, Stacking.