Review: Restricted Area

Posted by | August 12, 2009

restricted-area Welcome to the post-apocalyptic wasteland of Restricted Area by Whiptail Interactive and Master Creating. The game crawls out of the reduced price game bin having replaced a multitude of its own organs with those grown in vats cloned from Diablo—no, not Diablo II, straight original Diablo. The first thing that we thought when we were thrust into the windblown, sun caked desert outside of the central city is that we may once again be visiting the Valley of the Kings soon.

The first massive caveat against buying this game is that it’s loaded down with Starforce DRM—the fact that it’s loaded down with invasive DRM at all turns us off; but this particular DRM company has seen a very bad run (Reboots your computer without …

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Review: AstroPop Deluxe

Posted by | July 31, 2009

astropop-deluxe-poster We came into this game looking at the cute, smooth rendered characters as mascots for space adventures and companions in this arcade puzzler—however, when it came down to the brass tacks, this game just wasn’t our cup of tea.

AstroPop presents itself as an action puzzler involving another color matching mechanism that we’ve seen many times before. It sets itself aside from other games by presenting a new way to approach this color matching. Bricks arrive from the top of the screen with the player at the bottom. The player flies a ship with the ability to grab blocks from the descending colorful menace up to a stack of four, and can release them back. Matching four or more blocks causes them to vanish as per usual.

While …

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Review: FATE Undiscovered Realms

Posted by | July 17, 2009

FATE Undiscovered Realms is the sequel to FATE by WildTangent. Both of which have all the appearance of Diablo clones with numerous UI and game play design elements in common with the famous Blizzard game. A great deal of the story is front loaded in a long, tedious narrative voiced by an almost Shakespearian actor, but when it comes down to it, playing this game is less about the story and more about plunging through wave after wave of interesting monsters and then tripping over their beautifully rendered corpses.

The narrative and story of this game could have been done a lot better than it was. Especially being that the entire story at the beginning was narrated. Instead it comes across as a 1-2-3 style quest with nearly no explanation of why the 1-2-3 need be done. We found ourselves …

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Micro-Review: The Force Unleashed (Wii)

Posted by | December 4, 2008

Oh. Star Wars. How I love thee; let me count the ways.

Along with most Wii games, The Force Unleashed gave me the worst case of tennis elbow ever. But it was definitely worth it to watch storm troopers and strange plant creatures alike flying down corridors, screaming in agony…

Oh, that’s right. We essentially get to play as a bad guy in this one.

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