In case you weren’t aware, Tomb Raider is getting a reboot next year. Lara Croft’s origins are being explored in a new game about survival on a desolate island, and there’s a new CGI trailer to get you in the mood. Continuing the run of recent Square Enix pre-rendered trailers, it looks fantastic and I for one am looking forward to checking out one of gaming’s most famous heroine’s backstory.
After the fun puzzler Guardian of Light, the series is going in yet another new direction. We’re still firmly in the land of sequels and remakes (and this is yet another re-imagining of course) but I still find the concept of a new Tomb Raider game appealing. Hopefully they can pull it off. Check out the official Tomb Raider site for more info.
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.
To this day, the N64 holds my fondest gaming memories on a console. The PC may have stolen my heart eventually, but I’ll never forget the fun of my childhood, playing multiplayer games on my N64 with a bunch of mates after school, and during sleepovers.
It’s difficult to describe the levels of hype that I felt leading up to the release of Half Life 2, and I know I wasn’t alone. This was a generation-defining moment in gaming, the likes of which has never really been replicated, and likely never will, for multiple reasons. Not only was HL2 a huge leap forward for its artistic and technological design, it ushered in an entirely new way to buy games and changed the gaming landscape forever.
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.