Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City has gone all action…
By Paul Blackburn
April 15, 2011
… and Leon Kennedy looks really shiny. There’s another Resident Evil game with a rather uninspired name on the way, and it looks like we’ll be playing it as a whole new cast of multi-lingual super-secret Umbrella soldiers – also they don’t seem very nice.
I’m honestly not sure what I think about the look of this new Resident Evil, but then again I was never sure what I thought about Resident Evil 5 either. It was a great coop experience, and there was a lot of fun to be had shooting zombies and other such things with a friend online or via split-screen, but it was definitely more action-based than fear-based, and unlike its classic fixed-position-camera predecessors, I wasn’t scared by it once.
While it’s clearly set in the original location of the series – Raccoon City – we’re going to be seeing it from the perspective of these brand new characters, who seem to have an interweaving story to that of Leon Kennedy’s in the time of Resident Evil 2. It kind of looks like they’re pushing even further in the action gameplay direction with this new game, too. However, at least it doesn’t appear to be all bright, sunny, day-time weather in this one:
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.
VVVVVV is one of the only 2D platform games that I have completed from start to finish, which makes it special to me. I became obsessed with Veni Vidi Vici, an entirely optional sequence of deadly traps that teases you with a collectible orb right in the very first room, which is blocked off by a tiny box. You can’t jump in the traditional way as most other platformer’s, so the only way to overcome the box is by leaping up through the ridiculously cruel chambers above, navigating your way to the top…and then back down again.
The successor to Goldeneye, Perfect Dark improved every possible aspect of the classic shooter and created an original masterpiece. 4-player multiplayer game modes, with the option of adding 8 extra bots made matches frantic chaos and endless fun. The singleplayer was fantastic at the time, featuring such state-of-the-art features as realtime lighting, blood spatter effects, and fully voice acted cinematic cutscenes. It even let you play the story in local co-op with a mate – player 2 got to be Joanna Dark’s weird-looking blonde sister – the first game I ever encountered with a co-op singleplayer mode.
I don’t know many people who played Quantum Break, and nobody ever talks about it anymore, so it must have been rather forgettable for those who did. Even as I write this, two days after blasting my way to the end-credits of the 2016 bombastic time-travelling action romp, I am struggling to remember some of […]