Oct 20, 2011

Rage is the straightforward, back to basics first person shooter your daddy told you about.  Forget about leveling up, dialogue trees, and getting a useless sidekick.  If you’re craving a no frills FPS with zero cost of admission and shooting dudes is handled with a scientific method, id’s creation will scratch that itch. The weapons don’t contain more...

Oct 20, 2011

To use a trite political metaphor, Rage is 2011’s working man’s shooter.  More precisely, an unskilled hand with a conspicuously scant resume, lacking those bulleted selling points that make for effective elevator pitches.  This is bread and butter shooting and little more.  Can this be construed as a positive?  Sure, but it can’t hide the fact that...

Oct 17, 2011

Dark Souls: One of the best RPG’s of the year? Undoubtedly. One of the best action games of the year? The combat mechanics certainly seem tight enough. Best survival horror…? Wait.. What?! The truth is that Dark Souls’ genre classification is anything but simple. It’s a hybrid. While it is easily identifiable as an Action RPG, it borrows elements from...

Oct 8, 2011

Dark Souls’ valid failures are admittedly few and far between.  Complaining about how punishing the game is only proves that not every title needs to be Kane and Lynch.  Besides, it won’t return all those souls you just lost or bring any consolation as you’re getting gutted by a sword bigger than you are.  For the 49th time.  In one evening. The best...

Oct 8, 2011

Dark Souls is a grand achievement: it has a definitive idea about the kind of uncompromising game it wants to be and pulls it off with style and grace.  As you’ve undoubtedly heard, this game is very challenging.   From Software’s title arduously demands ceaseless concentration just to survive and advance, much less excel.  The combat here is...

Oct 3, 2011

Diablo III is unprecedented, instantly the stuff of legends.  The retooled interface is smartly designed but still wonderfully streamlined for single hand operation, making 4 Loko consumption effortless while you continue to wail away on ambiguous goblin creatures.  The mission acquisition structure is similarly based around artless functionality: when you...

Oct 3, 2011

The latest evolution of the Diablo series introduces plenty of new concepts  to keep the series fresh, but ultimately warps and dilutes the formula that made the series so popular to begin with.  Newcomers may find a lot to like here, but grizzled Hell-veterens may be repelled completely. The most glaring difference is in the atmosphere.  The game starts out...