Game Review by Eurogamer [8/10]

In the run-up to the release of Splash Damage’s team-based shooter Brink, there has been an odd reluctance to state plainly what, at heart, the game is about.

Perhaps it’s because Brink’s heritage lies in the mod scene, where its fundamental ideas were beaten into shape by amateurs. Or maybe it’s because Splash Damage’s Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, with which Brink shares its basic approach, sold only modestly. Or has it been fear on the part of publisher Bethesda that the team-based shooter at its core isn’t quite enough to raise blockbuster expectations on its own?

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Game Review by IGN [6.0/10]

Set in a nearby future, Brink attempts to do something different with multiplayer gaming by focusing on free-running and parkour. With some good ideas, Brink borders on fun, but its repetition, lack of depth, and graphical problems keep it from being a real contender.

Brink is set atop a floating city called The Ark that has been isolated for over twenty years. A bastion for surviving humans, the Ark is split into two zones, one guarded by security forces, the other by rebels. Brink immediately asks you to choose a side, but, you can take your persistent character through both sides of the bland story, making it pointless. In fact, during character creation, the only permanent choice is a character’s facial appearance and their tattoos. Beyond that, you can change your size, look, weapons, class, and faction on a whim. This makes starting multiple characters almost irrelevant, except that experience maxes out at level 20.
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Game Review by Guardian [16+]

In a world where first-person shooter titles are seeing their campaign modes paired down in favour of robust multiplayer modes, it’s worth remembering there are quite a few players out there who don’t have much use for online play. It may seem strange, but it’s a fact nonetheless.

Perhaps these players prize the single-player experience over everything. Maybe, for them, the story underpinning the FPS action is the main draw. Or it could be that they fear that if they sign up for online play, it will slowly take over their lives.

Whatever their reasons, I would advise any players without access to Xbox Live (or PSN or the internet), or who don’t like playing in online multiplayer modes, to be wary of Brink. There is a single-player experience in the game and there’s oodles of content for lone players to get stuck into.

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Game Review by The Review Crew [8/10]

Disney continues to milk the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. A fourth movie is about to hit theaters and along with it a brand new video game. But unlike game movie tie-ins this one is based on a tried and true formula.

The LEGO series of video games have been wildly successful. They are light-hearted, fun and filled with incredibly addictive gameplay. But another reason they seem to fly off the shelves is they piggyback on some of the most beloved movie franchises. Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Harry Potter; they all lend themselves to the whimsical stylings of a LEGO game. Pirates of the Caribbean is no different.

Captain Jack Sparrow, Will Turner, Captain Hector Barbossa and the rest of the cast are hitting your favourite console. Will it follow in the footsteps of other great LEGO games, or is this the first in the franchise history to be forced to walk the plank?

When you think about it Pirates of the Caribbean is a perfect fit for the LEGO franchise. The movies are filled with humour and wit which is what the LEGO series is known for.

Instead of focusing on a single movie, LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean follows the story lines of all four, including the upcoming On Stranger Tides. You’ll play through each of the four movies from beginning to end with a touch of LEGO humour thrown in for good taste.

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Game Review by The Observer [7/10]

In creating Lego Pirates of the Caribbean, developer Traveller’s Tales has carefully rebuilt the familiar world of the titular seafaring films from virtual plastic blocks, including locations and characters from the three already-released movies and the forthcoming fourth instalment, offering players a chance to explore an elaborate toy box reimagining of the world of Jack Sparrow.
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Game Review by 1UP.com [B+]

There is a long-running misconception in the gaming community that the Lego games are simply for kids. While this may have been the case for the first few installments in the series, developer Traveller’s Tales has constantly refined and improved its Lego-branded offerings to reach a wider audience. The latest entry, Lego Pirates of the Caribbean, is a further improvement over its predecessors, and one in which gamers of all ages will find something to love.

Fans of the series will immediately be impressed with the level of detail and authenticity shown for each movie. From the original Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl to the upcoming POTC: On Stranger Tides, all the films get represented in distinct story arcs split into five chapters each. The characters are rendered with outstanding animations — especially Johnny Depp’s incredibly eccentric Jack Sparrow. How the animators were able to capture so much of the caricatured nuance in Depp’s performance, and then transfer it into a super-simplified Lego minifigure is beyond me.

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Review by Eurogamer [5/10]

Don’t let its twin-stick control scheme or whimsical steampunk charm fool you. Gatling Gears, the latest from Greed Corp developer Vanguard Games, fancies itself as a manic, eye-watering, bullet-hell ‘shmup’.

Sure, it’s slightly more restrained and approachable than anything you’d find in an average Japanese arcade hall, but the meandering rockets, distinctive bullet patterns and screen-flooding ordnance all tread familiar ground.

Elsewhere, the game borrows its ideas from the litany of top-down, twin-stick blasters that have cropped up since Geometry Wars exploded into a glitzy neon hit. You’ve got schizophrenic analogue sticks, a butt-saving smart bomb that wipes the screen of foes and a handful of different weapons to choose from.
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Review by Game Spot [7.5/10]

Twin-stick, top-down shooters on Xbox Live Arcade and the Indie Games service are a dime a dozen. Games like Geometry Wars have set the bar high, making it difficult for new games to stand out from the crowd. Entering this crowded arena is Gatling Gears, a solid shooter with enough firepower to land it in the upper echelons of the XBLA library.

Gatling Gears stars Max Brawley, an ace pilot who deserts a corrupt, war-hungry Empire with his high-powered battle mech in tow. Max can’t hide out in peace forever, though, because eventually the Empire comes storming back in to ravage his peaceful hamlet, forcing him back into the cockpit to take down the Imperials once and for all. Players familiar with the developer’s previous game, Greed Corp, will find many references to that game in both the story and the industrial-revolution-inspired world design of Gatling Gears. Unlike the turn-based warfare of Greed Corp., however, Gatling Gears is all action, all the time.

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Review by IGN [8.5/10]

Gatling guns have been cool ever since Jesse “The Body” Ventura carried one around the jungle in Predator. Give a Gatling gun legs, and apparently you’ve got yourself a great video game. Gatling Gears treads familiar territory that may remind you of classics like Robotron and Ikari Warriors, but it hits all its marks and manages to stand out as one of the best arcade shooters around.

Gatling Gears is related to another excellent downloadable game called Greed Corp. They’re both set in the world of Mistbound, a once beautiful, green land now literally torn apart by excessive harvesting and mining of natural resources. While roaming through the varied environments you’ll see tracks of land crumble away and fall into the void below — a fantastic visual that was also a cornerstone of Greed Corp. You control a grizzled war vet that long ago defected from the evil Empire responsible for destroying this world.

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Gatling Gears Video Review

Game Review by IGN [5.5/10]

Thor for Wii lacks the high-definition visuals of its Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 counterparts and the old school, 2D brawler approach of WayForward’s Nintendo DS version. It’s also based on a movie license. You might assume the game is doomed to failure, but that’s not necessarily the case. Though plagued by visual presentation issues and limiting gameplay, Thor on Wii still manages to play passably well.

The story here is so basic and so similar to the other Thor releases it almost doesn’t matter. Loki dupes Thor into attacking other planets. Bad things happen as a result of Thor’s arrogance. You go smash things endlessly until something tells you to stop. What does matter, however, are the game’s fighting mechanics.

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Game Review by Game Spot [5.5/10]

An ordinary person might look at a hammer and see a blunt instrument that could be used to pound nails into a rocking horse or swing set. But if you’re a Norse god, a hammer is far more useful as a bludgeoning device against your mortal enemies. In Thor: God of Thunder, you swing your mighty weapon with a gung-ho, everything-must-be-smashed attitude that only those of divine parentage can pull off without serious repercussions. Fire demons, ice giants, and even stalagmites crumble before your unbridled wrath, with the only reprieve from your hammering action coming when you summon bolts of lightning or gusts of wind to employ a dose of elemental chaos. This mash-happy game contains little diversity or strategy, focusing on Thor’s maniacal destructive abilities as you swing your way through a seemingly never-ending horde of enemy forces. Thor: God of Thunder contains the turn-off-your-brain fun present in many brawlers, but tiring repetition drags even immortals back to Earth.

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Game Review by Guardian [3/5]

Obviously, Marvel’s take on Norse mythology was always destined for the epic third-person adventure treatment. And, although God of War got there first by some considerable margin, Thor makes a decent stab at both the movie it’s based on and the genre it aspires to.
The graphics, while not exactly jaw-dropping, are at least varied with occasionally impressive animations of your hero and the humongous boss characters he must conquer at the end of every level. The action kicks off in Asgard, with the home of the Norse gods under attack and Thor fighting to prevent the place being overrun by ice giants. Although borrowing some set pieces from the movie, the game also features events from outside the timeline that may be familiar to readers of the comic. And some of the tussles – for instance, with relentless enemies such as the Destroyer – remind you exactly how inventive Marvel’s back catalogue can be.
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Game Review by Eurogamer [7/10]

Hi Eurogamer! Last time we looked at an inevitable and overpriced map pack for Call of Duty: Black Ops together, we met Dave, my future brother-in-law. Dave and other (but not all) Daves are the reason that Activision can charge 1200 Microsoft Points for five maps while maintaining direct eye contact and avoiding a tell-tale blush.

Dave is new to gaming, and his 360 is almost exclusively a Call of Duty machine, only occasionally gasping for fresh air on the pitches of FIFA. In terms of the hours of play he’ll get from it, the best part of a tenner doesn’t seem much to refresh the COD man-shoot experience.

Dave doesn’t realise it, but a battle for his immortal soul is about to rage in the gaming heavens. EA is sharpening a trident imbued with runes that spell out Battlefield 3, Activision is feeding raw lightning into the machine that powers the COD conveyor belt and THQ has lit a tealight and whispered a few sad words in front of post-it note on which someone has scribbled ‘Homefront!’ in red felt-tip.

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Game Review by Metro.co.uk

Activision might like to think that Call Of Duty is review-proof but we suspect they might be in for a shock with this year’s sequel, given the groundswell of discontent amongst fans. But what certainly is review-proof are these ultra expensive map packs, which everyone says they resent but always end up buying anyway.

By now everyone knows exactly what to expect here: five new maps, no new thrills, and a £10 hole in your pocket. In that sense Escalation itself is no different than any of its predecessors, but you still can’t help but admire its craft and the way it gives its audience, more or less, exactly what they want. Just like Black Ops itself in fact.

There are four competitive maps here and one for the Zombies co-operative sub-game. The latter is Escalation’s main draw, but there’s something of interest in all of the others.

Hotel is some sort of Cuban holiday resort and the biggest of the competitive maps. Despite this it does make an effort to avoid being a sniper’s paradise, although given the map’s size groups of players can get easily become distanced from each other as they all rush for the high ground.

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Game Review by GTGD [9.0/10]

I like Treyarch. I really do. Considering they were given the arduous task of doing the ‘other’ Call of Duty games whilst Infinity Ward worked on the Modern Warfare series, they have constantly performed. Yet still they were the outcasts. In my honest opinion, out of the last three CoD games, Treyarch have made the top two.

Another thing that makes their games stand out is the DLC. Unlike the Map Packs for MW2, Escalation brings five brand new maps (no recycling here!), four standard maps and one zombie map (another thing that Treyarch brought to the franchise). With people starting to turn against the Call of Duty series, is this one map pack too far?

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Review by IGN 8.5/10 (Great)

As someone who is tired of the fact that every other game in development seems to be a shooter, Stacking is a breath of fresh air. An adventure puzzler (which means you go on an adventure and solve puzzles along the way) unlike any other game on the market, this game is oozing with charm. It shouldn’t be too much of a surprise as Double Fine has formed some of the most unique gaming experiences available including Psychonauts, Brutal Legend, Costume Quest and now, Stacking.

Wrapped in a fantastical diorama setting with silent movie-style cutscenes, Stacking actually tells a rather depressing tale of child labor. The entire nesting doll family of Blackmores, save the mama doll, has been forced into slavery. It’s up to the littlest one of the bunch, Charlie, to save not only his family, but the entire underage workforce from the evil Baron. Although the subject matter is slightly heavy, it’s presented in a comedic manner – witty dialogue and goofy animations amplify the fact that this game is not actually socialist propaganda.

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Review by Eurogamer 8/10

If you enjoy Stacking, you probably have amnesia to thank for it. It’s a condition games have been exploiting for years, but with Double Fine’s latest, the connections are a little more imaginative than usual. In most games, memory loss simply means that your grunty protagonist has woken up in a motel room and forgotten how to double jump. This time, however, the roots lie a lot deeper.

Actually, they lie with something called Amnesia Fortnights, an idea Double Fine boss Tim Schafer came up with to motivate his team during the endless slog of long projects. The concept’s simple (and you can try it at home, if you’re peculiarly motivated and have access to your own game engine and pipeline): put aside what you’re working on right now, split into creative little groups, and spend two weeks building a prototype for a brand new game.

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Review by Gaming Union

Tim Schafer just might be one of my favorite game designers of all time. He has graced us with titles that are simply amazing and his company, Double Fine, is continuing to produce new and innovative titles. Brutal Legend, Psychonauts and Costume Quest are among some of his most recent games and who can forget one of my favorites of all time, Full Throttle. Well, Double Fine is making the rounds and they have a new game for us called Stacking, a puzzle game using the traditional Russian stacking dolls as the characters. It’s an interested and unique game to be sure, but how does it “stack up” against other downloadable titles?

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Review by IGN 5/10 (Mediocre)

Despite being only 25 years old, my “brain age” hovers around the high fifties mark. It’s not something I’m proud of, but it’s the truth according to Body and Brain Connection. If you’ve ever played Brain Age on the DS, this is the same concept (and the same creator, Dr. Kawashima) only it’s built for Kinect. Designed around the idea that you’ll work your brain more if you use your body, this is supposed to help your noggin become better, faster, and stronger. After playing for a while, my score went up and down, but generally stayed in the same range. That’s fine, as I wasn’t expecting to get “smarter” overnight, but unfortunately I didn’t enjoy the experience.

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Review By Game Spot 6/10 (Fair)

While all video games engage our brains, some make cerebral stimulation their raison d’etre. Body and Brain Connection attempts to sharpen your wits with an assortment of minigames that test your mental faculties with light physical challenges. Using the Kinect’s motion-tracking capabilities, you solve fill-in-the-blank math problems by kicking numbered soccer balls or represent a digital time on an analog clock by positioning your arms appropriately. Body and Brain Connection is a successor to the Brain Age series in all but name, down to the daily tests of your brain’s age and the familiar host, Dr. Kawashima. It captures the self-improving appeal of the genre nicely, though it is also burdened by a few shortcomings. Some minigames are hampered by tracking issues, resulting in inadvertent answers, and swapping profiles midsession can also be problematic. It is ultimately a fairly shallow game, but Body and Brain Connection’s exercises offer a fun way for puzzle fans to get a few kicks out of their Kinects.

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Review by Game Reactor

Pile of Kinect games in your living room plus one. Subtract the wild excesses of Dance Central, but multiply educational merit, and add in family-skewed entertainment. What’s the answer? (Clue is in the title.)

First off, that game title is misinformation. You’re getting no more exercise from Dr.Kawashima’s regime than you do from motioning your way through the Xbox 360 Dashboard.

No way in hell does this game gush the same fountain of sweat that Dance Central does, or make you throw quite so many random shapes with wilful abandon as Kinect Sports. So if you’re looking for a two for one bundle you’ll be sadly bereft. Better to listen to a Stephen Hawking conference while working out to Ubisoft’s Your Shape: Fitness Evolved

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Review By IGN 8.5/10 (Great)

Marvel vs. Capcom 3 is an incredibly flashy, fun and kinetic fighting game, one that contains an unbelievable amount of depth. Beloved characters return to the fold while new arrivals, though bearing their own signature styles, have some similarities to classics that didn’t make the cut. MvC3 also manages to dig up some very obscure Marvel and Capcom heroes and villains, which will no doubt please longtime fans of both worlds. Less impressive, however, is the lack of diversity when it comes to the game’s modes. If you’re looking for an expansive, varied fighting game experience, it’s nowhere to be found.

This third entry in the MvC series attempts to be the same addicting game as its predecessor. We’re still talking about three-on-three battles, complete with the overly-exaggerated hyper combos that we all know and love. If you’re eager to cast fireballs the size of your HDTV, this is the game for you. The basic elements of tagging in partners or summoning them for brief attacks is still here, as is the notion of building up a special meter to execute particularly devastating moves.

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Review by Game Spot 8.5/10 (Great)

After a decade of anticipation, and a few long months of speculation, Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Fate of Two Worlds is upon us at last. This venerable fighting series, renowned for its structured insanity, has finally returned with the same fire and intensity that was its hallmark. However, not all the characters from the previous game have returned this time around–but not without good reason. Marvel vs. Capcom 2 was a game so completely dominated by a handful of characters and strategies that the majority of its design was rendered moot. Developer Capcom has since learned from this, and the changes made help distill this game’s combat into a more well-rounded experience than ever before. The result is not the most technically demanding of fighters, but is certainly one of the most enjoyable. The white-knuckle intensity is still here–but this is not the same game you remember from 10 years ago.

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Review by Cinema Blend

Let’s get to the characters first, as that was one of the major problems that I foresaw back then. The characters in this game are just fine and are so different that it’s like learning to play MvC all over again. Arthur is very different from Trish, who’s very different from Deadpool, who ‘s very different from Wesker, so you’ll spend hours upon hours just finding your perfect team (mine’s X-23, Hsien-Ko, and Akuma. Who knew?). One thing I don’t like about some of the characters though is that some of them are absolutely worthless in my hands. That doesn’t mean that they’ll be worthless in other people’s hands, and I can definitely see more balance with this roster than in the last game. But I can’t use Haggar or Thor to save my life, even though those were two of the characters that I wanted to play as the most when I initially heard that they were in the game. In this way, it kind of saps a bit of the fun for me, knowing that even with practice I won’t be able to use them since I’ve developed my own sort of rhythm with the game.

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Review by IGN 7.5/10 (Good)

Tasked with bringing de Blob 2 to DS, talented Australian development house Halfbrick has made some smart decisions. Rather than attempt to shoehorn 3D exploration onto a platform that’s not ideally suited for it, the team has instead focused the gameplay on 2D platforming, with rock solid mechanics that also make the most of the overriding colour motif.

For those of you unfamiliar with this series, the premise of de Blob is that the world has been drained of its colour by the evil Inkt Corporation, and its people – the Raydians – imprisoned inside ugly grey suits. It’s up to the player to liberate the people and restore colour to the world by literally absorbing different colours and painting everything you come into contact with.

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Review by Gamespot 7/10 (Good)

The blob known as Blob made his debut in de Blob when it landed on the Wii in 2008, introducing the world to a funky new hero whose ability to absorb color and spread it around was put to great use in that charming platformer. Now, Blob is back, but while fostering political revolution through paint is as intrinsically enjoyable as ever, a nasty tendency to punish you severely for failure and a few other issues prevent this outing from being as enjoyable as the first.

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Review by Joystiq

Religious cults. Stalinism. Labor camps. WMDs. For a kid’s game, de Blob 2 isn’t short on adult subject matter — even if it goes unmentioned in the ESRB box. Having expanded onto Xbox 360 and PS3, has the squeezable platformer grown-up?

When we left Chroma City at the end of 2008′s Wii-exclusive de Blob, the evil INKT Corporation and its leader Comrade Black had been freshly ousted by the titular hero. Now, Comrade Black, disguised as a cult priest named Papa Blanc, returns from expulsion with nefarious plans: rig the election of Prisma City (a new location) and drain its color (an old ambition).

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Decide how your enemies are going to die. Just shoot’em, or kick & shoot’em or Put a bullet in their head.

Review by IGN 8/10 (Great)

At face value I shouldn’t like Bulletstorm. It comes off as obnoxious and crass, full of toilet humor, emphasizing a sort of dickish boldness and attitude that’s been driven into the ground by countless shooters over the last few years.The “kill with skill” tagline and profanity laced combo names seemed so hollow when free of any context. To coin a phrase, it seems like Bulletstorm is compensating for something.
So it’s a surprise then that Bulletstorm is actually something kind of special. Sure, it’s still brash, and it’s still full of toilet humor, but with context, Bulletstorm is a violently charming popcorn shooter that plays well with some great design.

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Review by Game Spot 8/10 (Great)

Sci-fi first-person shooter Bulletstorm is a celebration of adolescent crassness. It is neither artful nor sophisticated, proudly wearing strings of obscenities as a badge of dishonor. Subtle it isn’t; entertaining, it is. Where the meatheaded characters and forced, childish dialogue fail, the gameplay mostly succeeds, pushing you through a variety of attractive environments and encouraging you to “kill with skill.” In Bulletstorm, you earn points by kicking your enemies into cacti, shooting them in the rear end, and flinging them into the air with your electric leash, among many other variations and combinations of bullets, boots, and exploding barrels. You spend these points on ammo, weapon upgrades, and more, giving you reason to perform these moves beyond the initial gratification they provide. Bulletstorm is sometimes ludicrous and often ludicrously fun–an enjoyable and occasionally embarrassing journey to the profane future it predicts.

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Review by Gameolosophy

Utopian future story for the stage, an elite peacekeeping force involved in the violent civil war. However, in this unit (”death echo”) has taken place in the intrigues of the event, making the two top players Ge Leisen. Hunt (Grayson Hunt), and Sato, Ishii (Ishi Sato) trapped in Stygia this abandoned paradise, and was forced to own another way of living. Players will play Ge Leisen. Hunt, not only can display a variety of top fighting moves, and use the first-person shooter in the history of the most unique and innovative weapons, fully integrated into the “mad bomb storm” unique “skill shot” mechanism which produce unparalleled access to violent games and fun exclaimed again and again satisfaction.

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Bulletstorm Video Review by IGN