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

Review by IGN 7.0/10 Decent

Ever since I saw Shank in a hotel room at PAX last year, I’ve been optimistic. With visuals that cross the grittiness of graphic novels with the strong design sense of cartoons like Genndy Tartakovsky’s Samurai Jack, Shank makes a hell of a first impression. Developers Klei have made some pretty big promises (whether inadvertently or otherwise), and expectations were built up pretty high. Now that Shank is here on PSN and XBLA courtesy of a deal with EA’s Partners program, Shank lives up to some of that promise, but stumbles where it counts most.

Shank gets up in your face right away and stays there with huge helpings of profanity, violence, style, and dare I say it, loving craftsmanship. From Shank’s public debut last year on, developers Klei have stressed that Shank was created and animated not by veteran game personnel but by traditional animators and artists, and, honestly, it shows.

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Review by Joystiq 4.5/5 Stars

\You’ve probably noticed that critics often employ flowery language when they’re trying to describe hyper-violence, whether it’s a “bullet ballet” or a “symphony of destruction.” Never one to use my evolved human intellect to mask primal urges, I’m going to try to explain the appeal of Klei’s side-scrolling kill-’em-up Shank in the most basic, honest terms possible. If the game’s not employing the slightest bit of nuance, I don’t see why I should have to.

Shank is a lot of fun because it lets you murder a lot of different people in a lot of different ways, and I think you should buy it.

You’re Shank, a former gang member and all-around bad ass who’s taking revenge on the crime family that offed his lady. He does this by killing, well, like a thousand dudes. In retrospect, it seems karmically imbalanced, but they killed the girlfriend of a guy who is (1) the lead character of a video game and (2) named after a prison knife, so I’m not sure what else they expected.

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Review by Games Radar 6/10 Decent

Shank has the makings of a great beat-em-up – most importantly it has lots of cool attacks and lots of cool weapons. There are three basic attacks: melee (your namesake shank), heavy attack (chainsaw, among other weapons), and guns (unlimited ammo). You can also throw grenades (limited quantity) and combine attacks with grapple moves or jumps. All of these moves and abilities can be linked together into seemingly endless combos, and when you get going against a bunch of enemies, much clever multi-button-mashing pleasure can be had.

Small control annoyances often sully the experience though, and in this genre, even a small misstep in the controls can become a deal breaker. For some unfathomable reason, the same button used for your main melee attack is also mapped to the item pick up action. Enemies often drop items when you defeat them, so often in the heat of battle this leads to accidentally wasting a health drink, which is especially annoying in multiplayer when you need a health drink and your partner with full health accidentally drinks one through no fault of his own.

Enemies also drop weapons you can use temporarily, like heavy machine guns, and when the area you’re fighting on is littered with machine gun drops on the ground, you’re forced to refrain from using your melee attack, because you’ll end up picking up and dropping the gun over and over instead of attacking, which quickly leads to death.

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Video Review by IGN

Review by Eurogamer 4/10

The two-faced mansion from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night endures in players’ memories because it’s the perfect venue for adventure. You never stop pushing into new realms, yet there always remains another locked door or an unreachable ledge – something more to discover. And, most famously, at the moment you think the journey is over, you learn it’s not even close. Symphony of the Night is a romantic’s idealisation of life: a cycle of mystery and discovery with no end in sight.

That must be a frustrating irony for Koji Igarashi. As the producer of most Castlevania games since Symphony of the Night – including the latest, Castlevania: Harmony of Despair – the series has offered him scant opportunity for discovery.

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Review by IGN 7.5/10 (Good)

Castlevania: Harmony of Despair is an interesting experiment. While it looks just like the 2D Castlevania games we’ve grown accustomed to since Symphony of the Night, it’s actually very different than any previous entry in the series. This is a multiplayer adventure designed for up to six vampire hunters to jump into the game together. In six maps, they must find and defeat the boss before time runs out. When you get a group of people together and finally figure out how the game works, it’s definitely fun. But it’s not very enjoyable to play on your own, it fails to explain its mechanics to the player, and most of the assets look like they’re pulled straight from existing Castlevania games. This one is for the hardcore Castlevania fans only, but I do think they will enjoy it.

There are six recognizable characters from the series to choose from and each behaves the way you would expect them to. For instance, Shanoa, from Order of Ecclesia, can use her Magnes ability to attach herself to magnets and use them to slingshot to hard-to-reach areas.

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Review by Destructoid 6.0/10 — Alright

On paper, Castlevania: Harmony of Despair sounds like a dream. A Castlevania game with six-player co-op, bringing together an all-star cast from the “Metroidvania” style titles, all rendered in glorious high-definition sprites. Sounds perfect, doesn’t it? What could go wrong?

A surprising amount, apparently.

Castlevania HD is by no means a bad game, but it is one of the most contradictory, unintuitive and downright confusing XBLA games ever made. Even as I write this introduction, I am struggling to recall how much of the game was fun, and how much was a repetitive, grinding chore. Once I’ve worked that out, I still won’t know if the fun parts were worth the absurdly demanding work that has to be put into it.

Harmony of Despair appears to have no story whatsoever. It’s never explained how the six playable characters meet, and the game’s six chapters (based on previous Castlevania games) seem to have no relation to each other. Castlevania HD has a very arcade feel to it, and makes no attempt to be cohesive or structured in any way. If you’re looking for plot, you won’t find it here. If you just want to be dropped into the action with no questions asked, then this game certainly does the trick.

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Review by Eurogamer 6/10

If you were in the Headstart week of Need for Speed World, in which early birds could tour the world a week early, you’ll have experienced a discouraging sense of isolation. The first multiplayer race I tried to join was a matter of sitting in a lobby with a single, silent avatar chosen from the small and self-consciously macho collection available.

The minute-long lobby wait was so pregnant with tension that I typed an embarrassed “hi” into the chat window, with 30 seconds left to the race. Fifteen seconds later, I got the reply “bailing if only 2”. He proved himself no liar, and some seconds after I was kicked back into the world. Was he rude? Was I expecting too much? Is it mentally ill to fall in love so easily?

As the week dragged on, it became clear that I couldn’t honestly review the game as an MMO racing game on the basis of the races I was having. There simply weren’t enough people.

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Review by IGN

There have been a huge number of free-to-play games released in the last year, from small-time publishers right up to the big boys. The latest in this lineup is Need for Speed World, from EA Black Box and EA Singapore, which aims to take Need for Speed’s popular street-racing formula and add in thousands of players who can’t wait to call you a noob. Although it was released yesterday, those who bought the starter pack have had access to the streets for an extra week. We took the game for a spin with the rest of the early-starters so that we could give you our thoughts.

First off, we don’t normally review free-to-play games. When a game’s price is zero, the barrier for entry is simply how much time you are willing to spend downloading and playing. However, Need for Speed World is only free-to-play up to level 10. When you reach that level (which will only take most players a few hours), you stop leveling up and are stuck at level 10 until you purchase the US $20 Starter Pack.

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Need For Speed World Game-Play Video

Review by Kotaku

Real-time tactics evolve with StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, Blizzard’s long in the making sequel to one of the most beloved, bestselling sci-fi strategy games of all time. Oh, so you’ve heard of it, then?

Three distinct races, the displaced humans known as Terrans, the ancient, mystical alien Protoss, and the insect-like Zerg horde, are (still) embroiled in an intergalactic war. Billions die as the Zerg swarm reawakens from hibernation four years after the events of 1998′s StarCraft: Brood War. In StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, players will largely experience the Terran side of this story under the command of Jim Raynor, hero of the original StarCraft and now enemy of the imperial Dominion forces. Raynor and his faithful crew of Raiders hop from planet to planet searching for artifacts that may end the Zerg’s reign of terror and that of its leader, the Queen of Blades.

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Review by Plagn

After 12 years of anticipation, three years of post-announcement hype, and a Beta that lasted a good few months (and was quite fantastic, mind you), the sequel to one of the most beloved PC games ever released, StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty has finally arrived. Blizzard Entertainment is notorious for taking their sweet time with their games, but are also known to release some seriously polished stuff. From Diablo to World of WarCraft, Blizzard has maintained a very solid track record, even if it does take about 80 human years for them to release a game. So how does arguably one of the most anticipated sequels in gaming history fare? Read on to find out.

Wings of Liberty is based four years after the events of StarCraft: Brood War, where the Dominion, lead by the tyrant Arcturus Mengsk dominates the Terran sectors, the enigmatic Protoss and their clans are in disarray and seeking to rebuild their once glorious empire, and the Queen of Blades, Kerrigan has mysteriously gone silent, as her Zerg broods laying dormant on their home world Char. You play as Jim Raynor, the returning hero from the original StarCraft who leads a band of anti-dominion forces known as Raynor’s Raiders.

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StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty Video Review

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Review by IGN 9.0/10 Outstanding

Videogames are an art form made up of visuals, sound, and a mysterious little something we call gameplay. Limbo is the perfect example of these three crafts working together in harmony to create something astounding. With no text, no dialogue, and no explanation, it manages to communicate circumstance and causality to the player more simply than most games. This 2D puzzle platformer in a film noir style is one of the best games you’ll play this year on any platform.

You control a young boy who wakes up in a forest with no indication of who you are, how you got there, or where you’re going. You set out to explore this bizarre environment but soon find it to be a dangerous place, at which point your motivation becomes clear: you need to get the hell out of there. No cut scenes or loading screens will interrupt the action, making it easy to be swept away in Limbo’s disturbing world.

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Review by Eurogamer 9/10

Limbo, the moody, monochromatic game that kicks off Xbox Live Arcade’s Summer of Arcade this Wednesday, looks gorgeous. Any screenshot will tell you that, and playing the game drives it home. The developers, Playdead, execute their aesthetic – like a gloomy Eastern European animated short seen through misted glass – with beauty and consistency. The game’s real success, however, is in refusing to be satisfied with looks alone.

Creativity thrives in limitations, and Limbo is rigorous in its self-imposed limits. It has no colour, no dialogue, minimal music, no cut-scenes, no on-screen health meters or other clutter. Yet you can’t expect limitations alone to make your masterpiece for you. After cutting away the fat, the obligation is to use what remains as convincingly as possible.

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Review by 1Up (B)

Limbo does a great deal with very little. Stark black-and white-visuals and a simple two-button control scheme (“action” and “jump”) highlight the power a talented developer can wield by keeping things simple. While the game’s story (and its abrupt ending) leaves a bit to be desired, the framework surrounding it provides more than enough reason to explore the game’s haunting world. At its heart, Limbo is a puzzle game: you interact with the environment and overcome obstacles while trying to avoid an untimely (and messy) death…but you’ll die a lot anyway.

Learning to find the dangers cleverly concealed in the game’s shadows keeps you aware of your simplistic surroundings, and draws focus to the minute details of the landscape. Limbo presents it’s fair share of platforming and precision button pressing as well, but unlike, say, Mega Man, you’re never forced to start back at the beginning of a stage.

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Video Review