Dead Island is out in the UK tomorrow. It was released in America a few days ago in what can only be described as a major balls-up whereby the developers unfinished test build was released for anyone who ordered it on Steam. Oops. Hopefully, the day one patch which came along shortly after has fixed all of those shenanigans and we’ll be able to play the game the way it was meant to be played. I was mostly curious to find out if it contained even a hint of the emotional heartbreak shown in that infamous trailer, but after the slew of hugely varied reviews, it certainly seems unlikely. The game does allow you to chop off zombie’s individual arms though.
Seriously, this game features some horrifically brutal and gory melee combat. If you’re playing with a gamepad, you can switch on ‘analog-combat’ which lets you swing your boat oar/crowbar/sword with ultimate precision. If you target a zombie’s arm, you can disable it by breaking it at the elbow, after which it will dangle there uselessly. Break the other arm, and the zombie will stagger towards you and use the only weapon it has left: its head. It’s hilarious, and sick, and oh-so-satisfying.
With such mixed reviews, I’m undecided whether to get this or not, but I’m very tempted. I thought I’d had my fill of zombie games, but the more gameplay I see of this, the more my interest gets reignited. Open world zombie survival on a tropical island setting might just be too hard to resist.
Dome Keeper is an excellent little spin on the tower defense game, in which you play the role of a jetpacking miner defending his base from swarms of aliens, whilst searching for a hidden relic buried somewhere beneath him. And now, with this huge free update, you can play it with friends.
I want to talk about Cloudpunk, a game where you get to be a flying-car delivery driver in a futuristic cyberpunk city. Its world is an incredible achievement of environmental design, and while the gameplay itself may be basic, the city of Nivalis is a thing of beauty to behold. Nivalis is built out of hundreds of hand-modelled cuboid buildings; there’s nothing procedural about it. Apparently it took 3 years for the devs to design the city, and it really shows.
I do love me some quality pixel art, and it doesn’t get much better than this. Cast n Chill is a cozy side-scrolling fishing game by small indie dev team Wombat Brawler, with absolutely gorgeous visuals. It’s simple to play, and you you can dip in and out of it at your leisure, making it a fine addition to our collection of coffee break games.
Return to Castle Wolfenstein introduced me to the world of PC gaming. I have my uncle Dave to thank for this. He used to play two games, Wolfenstein and Fighter Ace, and I loved going round his house because he had a gaming PC, curiously built by a company called Gateway… The PC was something so alien and awesome to me that it made my N64 seem like the toy it always was (I still love you, my 64). Wolfenstein became Enemy Territory, a free standalone multiplayer component, but it was the ‘original’ Return to Castle Wolfenstein that dragged me into PC gaming, and I’ve never looked back since.
Last night I finished Firewatch. It’s a first-person mystery game, being rudely dubbed a ‘walking simulator’ by some of the reviews I’ve seen elsewhere. While it’s true, the game has you fulfilling various tasks in a forest in which you navigate solely by hiking, that description completely ignores the beautifully told story and the reason you are there at all. Having completed it, I want to recommend it to everyone because it’s fantastic. I also would say that the less you know the better, so don’t read the rest of this review, just go and get it.
Portal is one of those games that sprang out of nowhere, taking everyone by surprise and causing a storm all across the internet. With almost no hype, and zero expectations, it came bundled as a throwaway extra in The Orange Box, arguably the best game bundle ever made.
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