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Feature: Going nowhere slowly
I'm a sucker for the future. Give me nanites, lasers, mechs, robots. Then blow them all up. Go further. Tell me stories about those that come after: the post apocalyptic survivors of a world built atop the ruins of the last. I'm a sucker for deckbuilders, too, especially when they're also roguelikes, particularly when they're brimming with clever ideas, and notably when those are woven…
Feature: Apes out
The streets are in chaos. There is a police officer beating a slum dweller. A red-shirted gangster has started an ill-advised stabbing match with three members of a rival blue gang. And an ape, recently escaped from captivity, is calmly watching it all, unable to speak the language of these terrible people. Amid such bedlam, what do you do as a player of Streets Of…
Feature: An elaborate flummox
"Oooh, that looks pretty," I said, marvelling at the screen that had caught my eye. "It's called Etherborn, please turn the hose off now." Matt explained. He was right. Etherborn is very pretty indeed. It's also a splendid wee puzzle game. And unlike an uncomfortably large proportion of pretty, ethereal, dare I say 'artsy' platformy games, it didn't make my very soul sigh with a…
Feature: Who taxis the taximen?
When I'm in the back of a taxi I'm most likely to be hoping that neither I or the driver end up coming off as an awful person. I am extremely unlikely to think of the driver as "a priest, a confident, a friend". But for all I know, you, the person reading this right now, are a big weirdo and pour your heart out…
Feature: Alien ant harm
2356. That’s how many van-sized ants Earth Defense Force 5 tells me I’ve shot, electrocuted, carpet-bombed, mortared and hammered into chitinous shards and umber mulch. All this since a bad day at work saw my security guard character roped into an increasingly absurd arms-race against gigantic invading alien frogs and their legion of insectoid thralls.
Feature: Close encounters of the bird kind
I'm a bit torn, readers. Eagle Island has a lot going for it. It looks lovely, for one, with a rich palette fully enlivening some classic game environments. Everything sounds great, and on paper its design is timeless, as you explore an island level by level, unlocking more powers with each defeated boss. And its novel weapon should be a huge draw - instead of…
Feature: Generational procedure
I didn't revise in school. I didn't even take notes. Things either went in or they didn't, and there was no point pretending I'd get anywhere staring at them all day. Young Nate Elbow took much the same approach. Despite his natural talents dwarfing those of his dad (the famous novelist Brendy Elbow), his refusal to spend his final school year cramming all the subjects…
Feature: Lords of luck
I look at my enemy, and I despair. Their army bristles with max-level units, scary abilities, synergies between both. Losing one more fight will knock either of us out of the game. It's do or die. I plunge all my funds into last-ditch recruitment, refreshing the available roster of heroes time and time again in the hopes of stumbling across one - just one, please,…
Feature: Catus Aran
Cats are adorable house pets loved by millions, but they're also fluffy little terrors. They can bring home their terrified, half-dead prey, lie down in really inconvenient places, or, y'know, press the one button that makes your spaceship plummet into an abandoned research facility. Gato Roboto is a cutesy platformer where you control Kiki, the house cat of a pilot name Gary, who is now…
Feature: I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky
The character Britta from the TV show Community once, when challenged, described an analogy as “like a thought with another thought’s hat on”, which is pretty good. So, that being the case, Sea Of Solitude is like a whole bunch of thoughts wearing other thoughts’ hats. The thoughts all did a wacky hat swap at the office for Comic Relief, and now none of the…
Feature: Soaked through
After nearly a decade of PlayStation exclusivity, Heavy Rain is on PC, which means you can now press 1 rather than X to “Jason! Jason! Jason!”
Feature: Tasty Bagrations
If the dazzlingly different duplex wargame I've been enjoying this past week was a debut release from a small, impoverished specialist studio that few had heard of, the paragraphs that follow would radiate enthusiasm. Because it's actually the work of a big (though not quite as big as it used to be) well-heeled company with a long history of producing well-received military strategy titles, the paragraphs that…
Feature: Tiny game, tiny price
1 Screen Platformer is a misnomer: the level might technically fit within 1920x1080 pixels, but the camera is zoomed in at all times. That means you never see the level as laid out above, with all the many deaths that await you on a single screen. Still, the idea is sound: a single level of tricky platforming challenges to be completed with 4 characters, each…
Feature: Eat yer heart out, Fran Healy
There are many types of rain. As we speak, the south of England is blessing us by alternating sunshine with heavy showers that are refusing to turn into a storm. Instead of clearing the air, the rain is only making it more humid. In 1920s Oakmont, the fictional town in new Lovecraftian detect ‘em up The Sinking City, the flavour of the day is constant…
Feature: Katana Zero, My Friend Pedro nil
Katana Zero has the juiciest text boxes I've ever seen. During dialogue, words can imply the pace of speech by appearing letter-by-letter or thumping on screen one word at a time. Words and phrases can be highlighted in different colours, and can further suggest intonation by animating wavily or by each letter shaking as if terrified. When in conversation, there's a timer during every player…
Feature:
Occasionally, when I pause They Are Billions and zoom out on my tightly packed, grid-based steampunk settlement, I think about how the tiny families in the centre could have just as easily lived their entire lives without ever seeing a single zombie. There’s little in the way of a fixed story or characters in this survival strategy, either in its separate challenge maps or ambitious,…
Feature: Fails to attain Equilibrium
My Friend Pedro looks incredible in animated GIFs. That's how I first encountered it, via a short clip which showed a man in a mask, hanging upside down from a zipline while he fired twin pistols in opposite directions. Now that I've played this run-and-gun platformer for myself I can confirm that this is one of many spectacular moves it allows you to smoothly and…
Feature: Pull the other one
What have those scoundrels at Devolver Digital gone and done now? Oh look, it’s Devolver Bootleg, a mixtape of the Punk IPA publisher's classics that someone left in their jeans pocket before a wash and now the musics all fuzzy and the track list is garbled nonsense. Also it’s one percent off, yeah, because screw…discounts? So, is this a delightful slice of performance-art-as-consumer-product brilliance? Or…
Feature: Crunching the numbers
As I climbed the steps toward the final, final boss of Octopath Traveler, I knew I was done for. Over the past 80-odd hours, I'd battled my way through this exquisite 3D pixel diorama the only way I knew how: with my three favourite and strongest characters doing most of the heavy-lifting. The fourth and final character in my party was whoever out of the…
Feature: Once more, Into the Breach, with feeling
I can go one of two ways with turn-based tactics games. Give me something like XCOM, where you’re thrown situations full of random variables and asked to make the best of them with inadequate resources, and I’ll go at it like John Henry, digging away in a doomed attempt to beat the machine. Give me something like Into The Breach, however, where there’s less element…
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