Review Archives (Staff Reviews)

You are currently looking through staff reviews for games that are available on every platform the site currently covers. Below, you will find reviews written by all eligible authors and sorted according to date of submission, with the newest content displaying first. As many as 20 results will display per page. If you would like to try a search with different parameters, specify them below and submit a new search.

Available Reviews
	Fuel review (PS3) Reviewed on June 12, 2009 Though on the surface the game appears to be just another tour of some established courses where your only goal is to finish ahead of all of your competition, that's not actually the best way to play. Instead, you're expected to chart your own routes while adhering to actual roads only to the extent that is required to pass through the checkpoints. Everything else is up to you. The freedom that this dynamic provides is cool at first. When you come to the first bend in the path and most of the other drivers ease gradually around it and toward the left, you'll probably love continuing straight ahead and launching over a ramp to shave a second off your time. Performing similar feats of daring on the next few bends is similarly great. Then you hit a tree and the cursing starts.
	Red Faction: Guerrilla review (X360) Reviewed on June 12, 2009 A vast game of utterly mad possibilities. There's not enough of a culture for Guerrilla to be proclaimed a true masterpiece, or even a revolution, but it's not a long way off. Rarely has open-world mayhem been so invigorating, so satisfying and hilarious. Far and away the best in the series so far, Guerrilla is the absolute statement of Volition's explosive plan - and Red Faction would struggle to return to its linear routes after this outstanding effort.
	Up review (X360) Reviewed on June 11, 2009 Fortunately, cooperative play alleviates some of that. Two people can pick up controllers and it's easy to join or leave a game with the press of a button. That allows a parent or elder sibling to save the day if kids are becoming too frustrated. It's a great way for a parent to connect with his or her game-loving offspring without having to spend forever figuring out how things work. It also means that the game could become the perfect choice for a few hours of fun when new visitors enter your humble abode.
	Amnesia review (APP2) Reviewed on June 11, 2009 If you create a public scene or break any laws (such as sleeping in public or leaving the early-game hotel room naked), odds are you'll wind up arrested. Humorously, you get to play through your final days in a jail cell, choosing what your final meal is, what denomination of priest speaks to you before death and whether you die by lethal injection or firing squad — just one more of the many things I loved about the writing in this game.
	Officers review (PC) Reviewed on June 08, 2009 Officers is a fun toy. Every map is like a sandbox in which you can rain destruction upon the Nazis. Its key feature, huge battles, is both the best part of gameplay and the worst.
	Steal Princess review (DS) Reviewed on June 07, 2009 Even though it's an interesting game, Steal Princess's overly complex, touchy controls tarnish the experience, and map creation is a spectacular failure. On the other hand, the game does feature excruciatingly dull story scenes mixed among its 150 stages!
	PDC World Championship Darts 2009 review (WII) Reviewed on June 06, 2009 2009 has made some big steps up from its previous version, but that everything about the game is so budget that it hardly looks any different from the initial outing made two years ago on the PS2 isn’t something that makes it an easy recommendation.
	UFC Undisputed 2009 review (PS3) Reviewed on June 06, 2009 UFC Undisputed has the makings of true MMA bliss, but its clunky, lifeless career mode and lackluster online play will only keep you occupied for so long.
	UFC Undisputed 2009 review (X360) Reviewed on June 05, 2009 In Undisputed, the tendency is toward striking battles, rather than toward what that particular fighter is actually most comfortable with or known for. Fortunately, this flaw won’t matter much for most gamers because the average MMA fan is still far more enamoured of fisticuffs and the sudden violence of knockouts than of rolling for submissions, which presents a decisively more subtle savagery. Besides, as with most one-on-one contests, the main draw is beating up on friends – not the computer.
	Bejeweled 2 review (PS3) Reviewed on June 04, 2009 PopCap Games first developed Bejeweled and released it in the Flash format back in 2001. Since then, the title has appeared on nearly every gaming platform known to man, ranging from the PC to mobile phones, the Xbox 360 and now the PlayStation Network store. Predictably, it plays the same on the PlayStation 3 as it did on Xbox Live Arcade, on the PC and—well, you get the idea.
	Stalin vs. Martians review (PC) Reviewed on June 04, 2009 But anyway, the game is an RTS in the same way that margarine is butter, which is to say it's not, but it looks similar! The overhead camera is old hat to the genre. The piles of units marching together toward their objective is familiar. The hud, with its point-and-click interface and minimap, leaves no doubt. Any given screenshot tells the RTS story, but it's only when you play the game that you realize that something has gone horribly wrong.
	Elite Forces: Unit 77 review (DS) Reviewed on June 03, 2009 Considering that the enemies pose no threat, basic ammunition is unlimited, and you virtually trip over medkits around every corner, you’d think Elite Forces is an easy game, right? But it isn’t, simply because things go wrong. Maybe Bill will die because he got caught in front of a gatling gun and the constant stream of bullets prevented him from using a medkit. Perhaps Kendra will decide on her own to move forward a couple of feet and detonate a mine that T.K. was disabling. Weird flukes in the design and AI contradict Deep Silver’s effort to keep the interface clean and intuitive, and above all else, Elite Forces strikes me as a very inconsistent game.
	Terminator Salvation review (PS3) Reviewed on June 03, 2009 At first, such encounters are thrilling because you don't know what's going on and it's easy to die. Any battle is epic. Then you learn how to utilize cover and you discover that you can basically just draw fire from behind a barrier while your allies shoot everyone from behind. That strategy works most of the time and when it doesn't, that only means that the roles have reversed. You're never required to do anything more mentally challenging than sneak and shoot.
	Super Robot Taisen OG Saga: Endless Frontier review (DS) Reviewed on June 02, 2009 RPGs are stereotyped as one of the more intellectual game genres, all about story and plot and meaning. Endless Frontier bucks this stereotype pretty hard. It’s a self-consciously dopey, disposable sort of story that’s little more than an excuse to string dungeons and boss encounters together. Much of the plot’s appeal is meant to rest in its nature as a sly crossover that puts Namco x Capcom, Super Robot Taisen OG2, Super Robot Taisen alpha 3, Xenosaga, and many other games into a single “multiversal” setting.
	Sacred 2: Fallen Angel review (PS3) Reviewed on June 02, 2009 I have a rule called the FAQ rule. If I reach a point where I find myself checking FAQs to see how much longer a game goes on, then I know the game has outlived its welcome. In the case of Sacred 2: Fallen Angel, I hadn’t done anything interesting, met any interesting characters, or even managed to become interested in my own character in over twenty hours of gameplay and I was nowhere near being done with the main quest.
	Hired Guns: The Jagged Edge review (PC) Reviewed on June 01, 2009 I’ve nothing against games being hard, but before you survive the first few initial outings, loot a few corpses and watch your team’s stats rise to the point where it’s noticeable, you’ll be spending a lot of time reloading old saves that took place before complete slaughters and eagle-eyed head shot levelled against you.
	Professor Heinz Wolff's Gravity review (WII) Reviewed on May 31, 2009 The very existence of the sandbox levels leads me to believe that Deep Silver liked what they’d come up with and assumed players would be intrigued enough to want to explore the world of Gravity further. So why, then, is there no puzzle editor? With Gravity’s content as limited as it is, and with each of the challenges simple enough in basic design that anyone could make them given an appropriate tool kit, a true puzzle editor could have been this game’s saving grace. With online functionality, the possibilities could have been endless.
	Space War Commander review (PC) Reviewed on May 30, 2009 Space War Commander is simple enough that it can be picked up and learned very quickly, and won't eat up your time with long-winded matches like other RTS games. The only thing really missing is multiplayer support, but even so Space War Commander is a superb time-killer
	Star Trek D-A-C review (X360) Reviewed on May 30, 2009 At its very best, D-A-C is a good online game with the potential to offer up some epic six-on-six space wars. But when Xbox Live is slow and you can’t find a full game, all that’s left is an empty and lazy solo experience.
	Rolling Thunder review (NES) Reviewed on May 27, 2009 By the time I'd gotten to about the third or fourth of the game's 10 levels, I was tempted to check my Nintendo to see if a slot for me to dump quarters into had magically appeared. By the time I'd gotten through a bit more than half the game, I was so frustrated and emotionally spent that for a minute I thought I still was married. And I wasn't even earning the admiration of other gamers like I would have been by putting myself through this anguish in an arcade — I was alone, sitting at home and feeling about as opposite from however awesome "platinum awesome" might be as humanly possible.

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