Check it out folks, our latest video review! Paul and Matt get together and chat about their thoughts on Klei Entertainments’ latest game: Mark of the Ninja.

Title: Mark of the Ninja [XBLA]
Developer: Klei Entertainment (Twitter: @Klei)
Publisher: Microsoft Studios (Twitter: @PlayXBLA)
Release Date: 9/7/12

Buy Mark of the Ninja on Xbox Live Marketplace

Mark of the Ninja was provided for review by Klei Entertainment. Story completed in approximately 7-8 hours. For more info on how VGH approaches game reviews, please read our reviews philosophy.

Editor’s note: While Pure Chess is available for both PS3 and PS Vita, this review focuses on the Vita version.

I’m a big fan of Hustle Kings, specifically the asynchronous message play multiplayer found in the Vita version of the billiards game. When I heard that the same development house, VooFoo Studios, was working on a Chess Game with a similar mechanic, my interest was immediately piqued. While the chess pieces in Pure Chess are just as gorgeously rendered as the beautiful balls in Hustle Kings, the “play by mail” functionality just doesn’t quite deliver the same oomph.

That’s not to say Pure Chess is a bad game – far from it. The chess board, the pieces, and the background environments are all quite well rendered and the accompanying music is comfortable and innocuous without ever becoming annoying. These inoffensive tunes come from four different genres – which the game refers to as “classical”, “jazz”, “chill”, and “nature” – and each genre can be individually toggled on or off. The menu system is straightforward and simple to navigate with either touch or buttons.

My biggest complaint about the game is really more of an unavoidable reality of the nature of the game of chess. My most-anticipated feature was the asynchronous multiplayer, where one player makes one move, then sends off a PSN message to their opponent saying “your turn, dude”. Upon receipt, whenever that may be, the opponent does the same and the cycle repeats until the game is won. In Hustle Kings, this process is fun and engaging because any time you sink a ball, you’d get to take another shot. Likewise, you’d get to watch the replay of your opponents shots before taking your own.

Here in Pure Chess, every single turn is always a one-move affair, making the whole thing somewhat anti-climactic once you’ve gone through all the trouble of loading up the game and checking your messages. If you leave Pure Chess running on your Vita in perpetuity, it’s not so bad, but if you play other games (or use Facebook, or Content Manager) and quit out of Pure Chess, the entire process just ends up feeling a bit too cumbersome for moving a single chess piece. I’m still glad that ‘play by mail’ is in the game, as it is definitely a welcome feature, but the Vita’s one-game-at-a-time structure and the basic rules of chess combine to create conditions that are slightly less than perfect for asynchronous play. A real-time multiplayer mode could have made for a more seamless, albeit lengthy, experience, but no such mode is found here.

Those issues are hardly VooFoo’s fault though. They’ve done a bang-up job of making a really solid chess game. The tournament play provides a nice challenge, as do standard one-off exhibition matches against AI. A tutorial mode is included that teaches everything from basic rules all the way up to advanced tactics. I’m no expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I even learned a couple of more obscure rules that I wasn’t aware of, like “castling” and “en passant”. If you’ve got a friend or loved one around, there’s even a pass-and-play mode for playing 2-player matches locally on one Vita. The included ‘bonus games’ work like a puzzle mode of sorts and can be quite the brain teaser. You are presented with a particular placement of pieces and are tasked with finding the solution to reaching a checkmate in a certain number of moves. They aren’t a radical departure or anything, but the added variety is welcome.

All in all, Pure Chess is a great chess game, but the lack of a true real-time multiplayer mode and the inability to initiate an asynchronous match with a stranger hold it back from being a truly exceptional one.

Title: Pure Chess [PS Vita, PS3]
Developer: VooFoo Studios (Twitter: @voofoo)
Publisher: Ripstone (Twitter: @RipstoneGames)
Release Date: 5/29/12

Pure Chess official website

Score: 4 out of 5

Recommended if you like:

* chess, duh
* smooth jazz

Highlights:

* Learning what “castling” was
* asynchronous play, though a bit clunky

This review is based on the PS Vita version of Pure Chess. A copy of the game was provided to VGH by Ripstone.

For more info on how VGH approaches game reviews, please read our reviews philosophy.

The PlayStation Move controller has always held quite a bit of promise in my eyes. The combination of better-than-Wii Remote accuracy with high definition, more powerful hardware has teased me with thoughts of what could be, but the reality of what we’re given has almost always let me down. Though I’ve often appreciated the optional Move support bestowed upon many PS3 titles, I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say that the existing crop of Move-specific games has been predominantly underwhelming. Sorcery breaks that pattern. Although it may not usher in a huge flock of new motion control supporters, Sorcery is easily the best PlayStation Move game to date.

Sorcery wastes little time getting to the spellcasting. Players assume the role of Finn, the young, brash apprentice to an older, more powerful sorcerer named Dash. While his mentor is away, Finn and his talking cat companion poke around the tower and stumble upon a magic wand and a mysterious potion. After fumbling around with basic spellcasting in the yard for a bit, the two venture off to the realm of the dead, provoked by an underhanded dare from Finn’s feline friend. Mistakes are made, secrets are revealed, and before you know it, Finn and Erline find themselves tasked with saving the realm from a powerful evil queen.

The fantasy-themed story and settings are a bit familiar feeling, but the relationship between the two protagonists keeps things interesting and helps to propel the exposition forward. Their playful, back and forth banter is genuinely funny. It rarely reaches laugh-out-loud levels, but the jabs and one-liners they lob at each other kept a grin on my face throughout much of the game’s duration. In fact, all the voice work in the game is fairly well done, even if the dialogue itself tends toward stale at times. Interstitial storybook sequences advance the plot between playable sections, an increasingly common characteristic of first-party Sony titles lately. It meshes well here, in Sorcery’s fantastical world.

Magic wielding is the central mechanic of the entire game, with everything from opening chests to repairing pathways involving some form of motion gesture. Thankfully, they all feel natural in execution and work to help increase the feeling of immersion. Playing with the Move controller in one hand and navigation controller in the other, I never grew tired of waving my wand to one side to remove a large obstruction from Finn’s path. Of all the game’s varied gestural controls, combat-centric spells comprise the bulk of them. They are easy to execute, requiring only a simple flick of the wrist, but difficult to master, partially due to the lack of an accurate on-screen point of reference and partially because you can curve your shots and aim at any point in the environment. There’s enough of an auto-aim assist that you’ll rarely find yourself in a tight spot because of input issues, but it can trip you up when you intend to shoot at one enemy and end up shooting at another. As long as you keep firing, you’ll eventually whittle away every last attacker, so I never found the slightly vague targeting to be much of a hindrance.

The problems with gesturing don’t really rear their head until you’ve spent a decent chunk of time with the game. Casting spells never really ceases to be fun, but since many fights essentially become flail fests, I’d sometimes feel my wrists suffering from flick fatigue. I was playing Sorcery under a reviewer’s time constraints, so this could be less of an issue for the average player who sticks to playing in shorter sessions. The pacing of the game’s structure does build in a little bit of breathing room for your wrists between encounters. Though the repetitive motions will likely grow physically tiresome, the actual act of switching between and casting spells remains fun and intuitive.

Progression in Sorcery is strictly linear, with the player traversing from area to area, fighting off groups of enemies, and solving light environmental puzzles in between. Treasure chests hide in the nooks and crannies, so venturing slightly off the beaten path is encouraged at every turn, but you’ll never deviate too wildly off course. A handful of specific segments have Finn imbibing a polymorph potion and shapeshifting into a rat or bird. These sequences exist merely to move you along from one area to the next, but the animation is fun to watch nonetheless. Boss battles occur at the end of each major area and are well thought out, with each requiring that you use your available spells to determine and exploit weaknesses.

New spells and upgrades provide a rewarding feedback loop and a tangible sense that the young apprentice is becoming more powerful as the game presses onward. Blasting pots and statues along the way will provide Finn with gold, which can used to purchase strange ingredients and bottles, which in turn are used to craft potions that enhance his various skills and abilities. An alchemy system makes mixing up these concoctions more interactive, complete with a fun mixing mini-game, but since each new potion requires that you combine the requisite three ingredients, you’ll ultimately spend far too much time in the menus preparing the countless concoctions. By the game’s end, my Finn felt nearly unstoppable thanks to numerous health, defense, and mana upgrades I’d chosen to unlock along the way, a fitting evolution for a tale about a young mage realizing his previously untapped arcane abilities.

Sorcery is the inaugural release from The Workshop and that shows through in a few weak spots. The game looks and sounds great, sporting lush, colorful graphics courtesy of the ubiquitous Unreal Engine but there is some small degree of tearing and an occasional dip in framerate. Once in a while, I found myself momentarily hung up on the corners of some geometry in the environment too. The camera feels a bit lackluster at times, as the only way to manipulate it is to snap it in place directly behind Finn at the push of a button. With the Move controller used exclusively for spellcasting, they’ve done the best that they could and while the camera tends to autofocus on enemies, I’d sometimes stumble to find my bearings when dealing with larger groups of baddies. None of these issues were showstoppers, but they were minor annoyances that pulled me out of the fantasy temporarily and detracted slightly from my overall enjoyment.

It’s been a long time since Sorcery was first unveiled at Sony’s E3 2010 press conference, before the Move itself was even launched. Looking back, that demo seems more like an early prototype, given the end result. Most of the concepts are there, but implementation seems to have been retooled for the better. The extra time has clearly worked in the game’s favor. There’s no replayability to speak of, once you’ve completed the game’s roughly six-hour story, but you’ll have fun the whole way through. As a game, Sorcery is good. As a PlayStation Move game, it’s great. It could arguably be played with a traditional controller, but to do so would miss the point entirely. Sorcery is the flagship experience that the Move should have launched with – a shining, albeit slightly flawed example of what can be done with Sony’s answer to motion gaming.

Title: Sorcery [PS3]
Developer: The Workshop
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment America
Release Date: 5/22/12

Buy Sorcery: Amazon

Score: 4 out of 5

Recommended if you like:

* Third-person action games
* Celtic mythology, magic
* Talking cats

Highlights:

* Drinking a polymorph potion for the first time
* Freezing an enemy, then shattering them
* Wielding the game’s final and most powerful attack spell

This review is based on a retail copy of Sorcery, provided to VGH by Sony.

For more info on how VGH approaches game reviews, please read our reviews philosophy.

From what I’ve gathered, Austin-based Lightbox Interactive had two headlining goals when setting out to create a follow up to Warhawk: to further evolve the already excellent multiplayer-focused groundwork they’d already laid and to also add in a single-player campaign, which Warhawk lacked, in order to further flesh out the new title. While Starhawk offers some of the most satisfying online play I’ve experienced in recent memory, the quality level takes a bit of a nosedive when it comes to the campaign.

When you first fire up the game, you’re greeted by the game’s protagonist, Emmett Graves. (Well, technically, you’re greeted with a 450 MB day-one patch and a 2 GB+ mandatory installation first…) Like Warhawk before it, Starhawk is a third-person shooter, complete with both ground and air vehicles. Unlike its predecessor, Starhawk features a full single-player campaign. The tale follows Emmett’s exploits as a rift salvager, a hired gun of sorts, cleaning up lucrative rift energy mining sites that have been overrun by Outcast, dangerous tribes of mutated former-humans. Cutscenes are implemented as animated comic panels (a la Infamous) and while this gameplay-comic-gameplay loop did pull me out of the experience a bit, it did at least eliminate any perceived loading screens between chapters.

Between the space-western motif and the interesting character designs, the narrative first seemed promising, but ultimately ended up feeling like a squandered opportunity, hampered by stiff, underdeveloped characters and a paper-thin plot. Occasional hiccups with dialogue audio – most notably some skipping during cutscenes – only further mar the overall experience.. Functionally speaking, it all ends up feeling mostly like an introductory tutorial wrapped in a story and although it fails to captivate, it does do a serviceable job of familiarizing players with the various weapons and vehicles found in the game.

While battling it out on the ground, Emmett is able to call in building structures from his trusty sidekick Cutter, in orbit above the planet’s surface. This imaginatively named ‘build and battle’ mechanic carries over into the multiplayer modes and forms the crux of what makes the online multiplayer so successful. Rather than having vehicles and weapons spawn at set locations on the map, they’re all tied to in-game structures which can be laid down virtually anywhere that there’s space for them. Need a rocket launcher? Call in a supply depot. Need a jeep? Have a garage dropped onto the field. The sound design is spot on too, with structures plummeting to the ground and taking shape with appropriately chunky effects. The ability to construct automated turrets and walls brings an almost tower defense-like element of strategy to Starhawk and makes for some immensely refreshing gameplay.

To keep things from getting too crazy too fast, these structures all must be purchased using rift energy, which you only collect while you’re located within the boundaries of your base. An overall 32-building limit per team helps keep things in check as well. Even without a defined character class system, the various systems allow players to organically develop a role that jibes with their play style. Builder, defender, ace pilot, flag grabber; none of these are ratified roles, but they’re all options available to the player. A skills system further enhances this by giving players the ability to earn an augmentation that suits them. Skills must be unlocked by first completing a related objective. While some might feel that this means that better players are rewarded with bonuses that enhance their abilities, I find that the skill effects are so narrowly focused that they don’t dramatically alter the balance. LightBox has clearly put an immense amount of thought and care into balancing all these disparate elements and it absolutely shows. Hawks are devastatingly powerful, but easily defeated by a determined foot soldier with the right tools. An energy shield can be constructed around your valuable buildings, but it can also be swiftly destroyed by a tenacious hawk pilot. Aside from the tanks, which can occasionally feel a bit too powerful, everything else in Starhawk feels pretty well-balanced. Between their past track record with the community and how active they’ve been since the game’s launch, I’m confident that they will continue to improve the balance even more in the coming months. It’s also worth mentioning that they’ve already announced that all future map packs for the game will be free, in an effort to avoid splintering the user base. In today’s DLC-saturated market, you don’t see that kind of thing often and I commend their decision to do so.

Though my time spent with Starhawk thus far has been overwhelmingly positive, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out a couple of minor gripes. For one, there is a ton to learn in the game. Much of it came naturally to me, having played Warhawk in the past, but there are plenty of things that still weren’t well-explained. For example, the skills system requires that players complete a certain objective before they’re allowed to spend points and unlock a given skill. The descriptions of some of these objectives state that the player needs to earn a particular medal, but the definitions for these medals are nowhere to be found, as far as I could tell. I’m not a fan of the constant hand holding that’s often done in modern games, but pointing the player in the right direction a bit would be nice.

While I found matches to be well-balanced much of the time (especially when teammates are communicating with headsets), it would be nice to be able to assign waypoints on the fly. There are on-screen indicators for things like flags and capture points, but it would be handy to be able to designate certain locations or structures with a user-defined indicator, especially for those players who aren’t making use of voice communication.

Starhawk features a co-op mode, where up to 4 players defend a rift mining rig from waves of enemies. I’m always up for a good horde-style co-op mode and I like Starhawk’s in theory, but in practice it was just far too difficult. I teamed up with 3 friends and gave it a shot, but after failing to pass even the second wave we decided to throw in the towel after the fifth or sixth failed attempt.

Starhawk as a whole is a fantastic experience. Even with its subpar campaign and minor bugs, the positives outweigh the negatives by a mile. I may not have been enthralled with the campaign, but I’d rather have a mediocre one that none at all. It also serves as a welcome tutorial for multiplayer, where Starhawk truly excels. Very few games can rival the level excitement of playing on a full server, with teams battling out to take each other’s flags or gain control of zones. The unpredictability introduced by the build and battle system elevates what could have been just another team-based shooter into the marquee online experience of this year.

Title: Starhawk [PS3]
Developer: LightBox Interactive (Twitter: @DylanJobe)
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment America
(Twitter: @PlayStation)
Release Date: 5/8/12

Buy Starhawk: Amazon

Score: 4 out of 5

Recommended if you like:

* Flying, driving, building, battling
* Warhawk (duh)
* Free future map packs! (Kudos LightBox!)

Highlights:

* Jetbikes, jetpacks, hawks, oh my!
* Transforming from a bipedal mech to space fighter
* Dropping my spawn pod on an enemy’s head
* Dropping a building on an enemy’s head
* Getting chased while on a jetbike, flag in hand, all the way back to base and just *barely* capturing the flag before getting killed

This review is based on a retail copy of Starhawk, provided to VGH by Sony.

For more info on how VGH approaches game reviews, please read our reviews philosophy.

StarDrone Extreme is a bit of an oddity. Hailing from Eastern European indie house Beatshapers, it’s pitched as a “high-speed action thriller with a mix of arcade action, pinball, breakout, physics and collect-the-objects”. That’s a pretty wordy bit of marketing, so let’s just classify it as a “flinging” game to keep things simple. StarDrone originally hit the Playstation 3 last year with Move support in tow with little fanfare to relatively mixed reception. Now, the slightly tweaked StarDrone Extreme has made its way to the Playstation Vita.

In the game, you indirectly control a constantly-moving spaceship by tethering it to nearby beacons, releasing the tether, and flinging the ship into the desired direction. In each stage, you’ll be picking up collectibles and trying to keep up your momentum – and thereby your multiplier – and finish in the shortest time possible in order to earn a higher score. It’s simpler in practice than it first sounds, but if you’re feeling confused, just watch the trailer below and you’ll get a basic understanding of how it plays.

In the original PS3 iteration, this tethering mechanic was controlled by pointing the analog stick toward a beacon and holding a button or by using the Move controller to point toward a beacon and holding a button. Evidently, “extreme” is marketing-speak for “touch controls”, because the different input method is the only discernible major difference between Extreme and its predecessor. In the Vita version, you use either the touchscreen or the rear touch panel and tap to tether to nearby beacons. Both options work pretty well, but I found myself favoring the rear panel if only to avoid partially obscuring the screen with my large, manly hands. Although I had no real problems using the touch controls, I was a bit disappointed to find that traditional stick and button controls weren’t even an option. It just seems like an odd choice when the original PS3 version already had it in there.

The entire package tends to feel a little bit bare bones, but these are some really sturdy bones. The controls are solid and responsive, the visuals are interesting without being overwhelming, and the short length of the stages make for great pick-up-and-play action on a portable platform. The game also supports cross-continuous gameplay, insomuch as you can upload your save data to the cloud and pick up your progress on the PS3 version, and vice-versa. Beatshapers recently even lowered the price of the PS3 version of StarDrone, further easing the ability to placeshift your game progress.

StarDrone Extreme may be just a fling, but it is a fairly unique entry in the arcade-style score chasing genre. While it didn’t exactly set the world on fire the first time around, Vita owners absolutely should give this new iteration a whirl. This is exactly the type of the game that the platform so direly needs right now – fun, bite-sized chunks of gameplay in a very reasonably-priced package.

Reviewer’s note: Upon release, StarDrone Extreme featured a 99-cent in-game purchase that would allow the player to skip levels. Some people seemed to take exception to this idea and Beatshapers has since made the level skipper DLC free.

Title: StarDrone Extreme [PS Vita, downloadable]
Developer/Publisher: Beatshapers
Twitter: @Beatshapers
Release Date: 4/17/12

StarDrone Extreme official webpage

Score: 4 out of 5

Recommended if you like:

* score chasing
* Fast-paced arcade games

Highlights:

* Cross-platform saves
* Really inexpensive! ($4)

StarDrone Extreme was provided for review by Beatshapers. It is available from the Playstation Store on PlayStation Vita for $4 and its predesscor is also available on Playstation 3, also for $4.

For more info on how VGH approaches game reviews, please read our reviews philosophy.

Have you ever found yourself playing Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars and thinking, “this is fun, but what would really be great is if you took out all this soccer stuff and replaced it with guns and rockets”? No? Yeah, neither have I, but at first blush, that was the vibe I was getting from Wheels of Destruction: World Tour before actually getting my hands on it. Upon playing it, I found Wheels of Destruction felt a bit more like a vehicular game of Unreal Tournament accompanied by a control scheme I’d summarily label as “wonky”.

Factually speaking, Wheels of Destruction is a class-based vehicle combat game, powered by the ubiquitous Unreal Engine, and available exclusively on the PlayStation Network, from independent developer Gelid Games (whose website is currently comprised of, I shit you not, a mid-nineties style ‘Under Construction’ graphic).

In terms of modes, standard shooter fare is on offer here, with deathmatch, team deathmatch, and capture the flag all making an obligatory appearance. Up to twelve players can battle it out on five maps, each of which shares a name with a major real-world city, but share little else in terms of resemblance. Granted, this is a post-apocalyptic future, but the landmarks feel haphazardly thrown in to justify the maps’ names. Geographic concerns aside, I did actually like the map design, for the most part. There are ample opportunities for jumping off of ramps and weapon pickups are liberally spread about, but there are a handful of places that just seem not very well thought out (a ramp on one map that almost always lead to me crashing straight into a ledge comes to mind).

The most unique thing about Wheels of Destruction is probably its control scheme… and not in a good way either. Rather than use the left analog stick to steer and the right stick to aim, as I would have assumed it would work, the left stick pulls double duty and the right stick doesn’t do anything. Essentially, when you press the accelerator, your vehicle will drive in the direction that your reticle is facing. It’s a bit difficult to put into words, but it felt like a funky mashup between Halo’s Warthog and a standard driving game’s controls. It took me a handful of rounds to get the hang of it and even then, I only felt I had a cursory grasp on the controls. Thankfully, that wonkiness is somewhat offset by the fact that you cannot aim up or down and targeting is handled somewhat automatically, given that you’re close enough to an enemy and aiming in their general direction. The best way I can think of to describe it is “serviceable”. It gets the job done, but it stifles overall maneuverability and makes navigation a bit more cumbersome. Thankfully, there’s also a jump button and any time you jump, your vehicle will automatically right itself and face in the direction that you’re currently aiming. As annoying as it can sometimes be, you tend to forget the frustration, if only momentarily, when you’re flying through the air and performing sweet flips.

This being a heavily multiplayer-focused game, there is no story nor campaign to be had, but you can play offline against bots. When playing offline, you have the benefit of always having a full complement of players, though I did feel like the enemy AI was perhaps slightly too good at killing me. I was pleased with the performance of my computer-controlled buddies for the most part. Our more-machine-than-man team was able to win capture the flag and my AI teammates even scored a few captures themselves. Since I was playing in advance of the game’s release, the online community was pretty sparse, to say the least. The relatively few matches that I did play against actual human beings were pretty fun though. Gameplay can feel fast-paced and at times even a bit chaotic when you have a full room going. However, some of the maps have a bit too much ground to cover when only playing with 4-6 people. Only time will tell how much of a following the game will garner, but I can at least say that you’re better off talking a few friends into getting the game if you decide to pick it up.

As an Unreal Engine-powered game, Wheels of Destruction is no slouch in the graphical department. Vehicles, weapon pickups, effects, and environments are all crisply rendered, but things can feel a little bit bland on the whole. How much of that is due to a lack of variety or creativity versus how much of it was due to intentional design choices which establish the post-apocalyptic setting is hard to say.

Ultimately, Wheels of Destruction does some rad flips, but fails to stick the landing. It’s full of great ideas and even dares to be different in a few of ways. Unfortunately, it falls flat in some of those regards and many of the great ideas just aren’t that well-executed. If you’re a car combat fanatic, go ahead and kick the tires on this one – it’s a fairly low-risk endeavour at only $10. Everyone else should probably take a detour and route around the destruction.

Title: Wheels of Destruction: World Tour [PSN]
Official game site: Wheels of Destruction website
Developer / Publisher: Gelid Games
Release Date: 4/3/12

Score: 3 out of 5

Recommended if you like:

* Twisted Metal, car combat in general
* Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars, but could do without the soccer
* ramps, jumps, boosts

Highlights:

* Wicked backflips (and front flips)
* Finally getting a decent grasp on the aiming/steering controls
* Unreal-powered graphics

A copy of Wheels of Destruction was provided for review by the publisher.

For more info on how VGH approaches game reviews, please read our reviews philosophy.

Note (2/26/2013): In the wake of the dissolution of THQ, the multiplayer servers for the XBLA version of Nexuiz have been shut down. If the game sounds fun, there’s always still the PC version, which is still functional as of this update.

Nexuiz, the third title in Microsoft’s “House Party” 2012 promotion on Xbox Live Arcade, is an arena-based first-person shooter which initially began life over a decade ago as a freely available quake mod. This new commercially released iteration from Illfonic may be gussied up to match modern technical expectations, but the game’s lineage is immediately felt the moment you jump into a match.

Intense and fast-paced, Nexuiz’s design sensibilities are clearly rooted in a bygone era. One where there was no sprint button because your player character already moved quite swiftly in the first place and where the word “gib” was an everyday part of a gamer’s vernacular.

Nexuiz has all the trappings you’d hope to find in a twitch-based shooter. An array of interesting weapons, various power-ups, jump pads, and teleporters all make an appearance, but the most interesting addition is what Illfonic call “dynamic mutators”. These special power-ups provide a somewhat random twist on gameplay, if only for a limited amount of time. Some are beneficial enhancements like a higher jump, a stronger melee attack, or even jet packs, but they can also create effects that hamper your opponents, my favorite of which is one that foists inverted controls upon members of the other team. Though brief in duration, I felt like they were incredibly effective at spicing up the otherwise relatively straight-forward gameplay with some much-appreciated variety.

Gameplay consists of your standard issue team deathmatch or capture the flag, but there are enough maps to keep things feeling fresh. The combination of the game’s fast pace, scattered weapon pickups, and dynamic mutators keep things lively and interesting. The only major gripe I had with gameplay is that when a player abruptly quits a match, a new one is never brought in (neither human nor AI-controlled) and the balance can be pretty dramatically impacted.

While its gameplay and design aesthetics may be old school, the graphical fidelity of Nexuiz is decidedly new school. Powered by the gorgeous CryEngine 3, this is easily one of the best looking downloadable games I’ve seen. It’s always refreshing to play a game that makes use of the full spectrum of colors when so many other contemporary shooters feel mired in browns and grays.

I struggle to find negative things to say about Nexuiz in terms of gameplay and design, but the story is, well… another story. The narrative, if you can even call it that, is thin and just plain stupid. However, I’d be remiss to knock the game for it because in a game like this, there’s no need for a story. You’ve got a red team, you’ve got a blue team. They shoot each other. Everyone has a good time. The end.

The music of Nexuiz is top notch, but that’s to be expected when one of the studio’s co-founders is renowned musican Raphael Saadiq. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the sound effects. They’re adequate, but not much better than that. Something about them just lacked a certain aural thickness and I didn’t feel like they lived up to the game’s beautiful visuals or frenetic pacing. Nothing close to being a deal-breaker, but I simply felt the audio was slightly lacking.

The one major drawback is that there’s very little to do in the game offline, aside from playing against bots. That’s not really a slight against Illfonic, but more just the nature of the beast when it comes to downloadable online shooters. They live and die by community and whether Nexuiz’s will flourish or not remains to be seen.

Priced at only $10 (800 MS points), it’s easy for me to recommend Nexuiz to anybody with even a moderate level of interest in competitive online first-person shooters. If the concept has you intrigued, but you’re not totally sold on it, I’d suggest trying the demo and perhaps waiting for a week or two to see how things pan out. If, however, you fondly recall the days where the likes of Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament were all the rage, this game is practically tailor-made for you.

Title: Nexuiz [Xbox 360, downloadable]
Developer/Publisher: IllFonic, LLC
Twitter: @IllFonic
Release Date: 2/29/12

Nexuiz official website

Score: 4 out of 5

Recommended if you like:

* Old school first-person shooters
* Gibs

Highlights:

* Dynamic mutators
* (temporary) Jetpacks!

Nexuiz was provided for review by THQ. It is initially available only on Xbox 360, but will be making it’s way to PC and PlayStation 3 in the future.

For more info on how VGH approaches game reviews, please read our reviews philosophy.

If you’re anything like me, you probably had zero idea what Zack Zero was a week ago. The game seemed to materialize out of nowhere and appear on the PSN release list. In my experience, this tends to be a bad sign, but it turns out that this is actually a pretty solid 2.5D platformer.

Zack Zero is the first game from Crocodile Entertainment, a small development studio in Spain. In it, players take control of the game’s titular character in a fairly standard “awesome space guy must save the girl, stop the bad guy, and save the world” storyline. You’ll fight enemies, solve basic environmental puzzles, and defeat some pretty cool bosses as you make you way through an enemy base, an underground cavern, and a prison on your quest to save your fair maiden Marlene and take down the evil Zulrog. In-game dialogue is limited to simple text bubbles, but cutscenes play out in an animated comic book style, voiced by an over-confident and somewhat campy sounding narrator. I could easily take it or leave it – nothing about it is truly noteworthy, but none of it is so bad that it takes away from the overall experience either.

Though it’s a 2D side-scroller, everything is fully rendered in 3D. Enemies, environments, and Zack himself are all crisply rendered and lit and vibrant color abounds. I found the graphics to be pretty impressive, especially for a PSN game. Enemies will emerge from different parts of the environments, platforms will be at different depths, and Zack will even curve around objects in the environment as he moves past them. The developers do a pretty good job of preserving this perception of depth by automating everything that could potentially become problematic. Zack automatically aims slightly up or down when shooting at enemies and automatically transitions between foreground and background layers when jumping between platforms. It all works well, most of the time, with only a few frustrating exceptions here and there.

Zack’s basic abilities include a blade launcher that can reach enemies at a decent range and the same button will automatically trigger melee attacks when enemies are in close proximity. In terms of navigating the environment, a double jump and a ledge grab make Zack a pretty nimble guy. The game’s most notable game mechanic is Zack’s experimental nanotech suit, which allows him to switch into 3 other modes: fire, ice, and stone. Each one provides a separate set of unique abilities, all of which become more powerful as you level up. The leveling system essentially boils down to a simple “the more stuff you collect, the more powerful you’ll get” progression, but having a regular trickle of improvements throughout the course of the game is certainly a welcome inclusion.

My time with Zack Zero was mostly a positive experience, but there were a couple of rough edges here and there. As much as I enjoyed the feeling of depth created by the 3D visuals, there were a handful of times where I had trouble jumping to a platform in the background while positioned in the foreground. Nothing too terribly infuriating, but a bit annoying nonetheless. Think LittleBigPlanet, but with slightly less manual control over which layer you’re positioned in. Falling deaths end in a brief cutscene that depicts Zack plummeting to his death. They’re aesthetically pleasing, but the repeated viewing of the scene quickly grows tiresome in some of the trickier platforming sections. Short intro scenes that begin each boss fight are also unskippable, which can lead to some mild annoyance when you repeatedly die during a fight and are then forced to sit through the scenes again and again.

Minor quibbles aside, Zack Zero is the very definition of a pleasant surprise. Just a week ago, I had literally never heard of the game and now it joins a growing list of solid downloadable platformers available on the Playstation Network. With recent releases like Rochard, Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken, and Sideway: New York, fans of the genre are definitely being well served.

UPDATE: While playing Zack Zero, I encountered a few system lock-ups. I did not hold this against the game when considering my review score, as the game hadn’t officially come out in the U.S. yet. Since I was able to successfully play the game without issue after signing out of PSN, I had assumed that it was somehow related to leaderboards or some other network-related issue that might be alleviated once it was officially released. I’ve since learned that this is not the case and the game still does tend to lock-up if you’re signed into PSN. Crocodile Entertainment are aware of this issue and are working to address it. Please read this post on the Zack Zero site regarding the matter.

Title: Zack Zero [PS3]
Developer/Publisher: Crocodile Entertainment
Twitter: @CrocodileEnt
Release Date: 1/17/12

Zack Zero official website

Score: 4 out of 5

Recommended if you like:

* 2.5D platformers
* Comic book-style action heroes
* Supporting indie developers

Highlights:

* Multiple suit modes with different powers
* Crisp, colorful graphics
* Finding hidden collectibles

Zack Zero was provided for review by Crocodile Entertainment. For more info on how VGH approaches game reviews, please read our reviews philosophy.

When Q-Games announced in 2009 that their new PixelJunk title would be called PixelJunk Shooter, despite it playing more like Solar Jetman than Gradius, the 2D shooter fan in me cringed a little. Fast forward a couple years and Q-Games has spun elements from that game into a new title that plays more like a traditional shooter but, in a small twist of irony, is called PixelJunk SideScroller to set it apart from its less shootery siblings.

(Don’t worry. There will be time for questions at the end.)

Luckily, the confusion goes away once you get past the title screen. SideScroller is presented like Q-Games’ homage to this genre that was once an arcade cornerstone. It takes Shooter‘s cartoony, sci-fi aesthetic and coats it with a neon glow, mimicking the look of classic vector graphics games like Tempest and Defender. It even goes so far as to warp the corners of the screen to make it look like you’re playing on an arcade cabinet. It looks fantastic, but it occasionally gets in the way of locating your ship on the screen, which is a problem when trying to navigate waves of bullets. (If “waves of bullets” scares you, don’t worry–there are only a few really bullet-intensive areas in the game, and none of them approach “bullet hell” levels of density–at least not on Normal difficulty.)

Although the visuals make a bold statement, the gameplay remains more on the safe side for a shooter. Your ship travels from left to right and you shoot enemies with three main weapons: a rapid-fire machinegun, a narrow laser beam that pierces targets, and upward- and downward-firing bombs that help take out heavily armored turrets you’ll find throughout each sector. You start with all three weapons and can switch between them at any time, so it’s up to you to choose the best one for your current situation. You can also pick up a shield and several levels of upgrades for each weapon, and a chargeable spin attack launches the ship itself into enemies. Borrowing from Shooter, getting shot will cause your ship to overheat and you’ll have a few moments before it explodes to find some restorative water or health powerups.

That’s a solid foundation, but SideScroller suffers from awkward controls that make it frustrating to play. When I first started the game, I instinctively went to the D-pad and face buttons for movement and shooting, only to learn that the game uses R1 to shoot and reserves the face buttons (or LR/R2) for cycling through weapons. What took longer to realize is that it also expects players to use the left stick to move; the ship feels very slippery with the D-pad and the analog stick offers a welcome amount of precision–although the controls still aren’t as tight as you might hope for in a shooter. As a result, it can be difficult to land precision shots with the laser, and it’s hard to weave through the aforementioned waves of bullets with much confidence. I found it was a better bet to just find a safe area on the screen.

The weapon select system never became intuitive either, even after hours of playing the game. The biggest problem is you have to cycle through each weapon linearly, and while that means your desired weapon is one button press away in theory, during an intense firefight, you’ll often end up cycling the wrong direction and firing something that’s dramatically different than what you expected. These sound like minor details, but just for example: Far too many times I would end up wanting to switch to the laser to take out a line of enemies flying straight towards me, but I’d accidentally switch to bombs and find myself shooting at the ground as the enemies crashed into my ship. This could easily be fixed by an onscreen weapon indicator[1] or just having the face buttons switch to a weapon directly. Hopefully Q-Games can address this in a patch, because when you’re trying to make split-second decisions on how to best take out a group of enemies, the last thing you need to be doing is trying to remember which weapon is up next.

If you don’t want to worry as much about the controls or just the general difficulty (which is probably too high for an easily frustrated player), you can turn the game down to Casual–where enemies move slower and shoot fewer bullets–and enjoy some light shooting action while taking in the rest of the game. Sadly, aside from the wonderful retro aesthetic, SideScroller doesn’t have much else to offer. While each new area in Shooter introduced more gameplay elements, the strategy in SideScroller remains the same throughout (Shoot everything!), and after a while the sectors blur together into a homogeneous, neon haze. The electronica duo, High Frequency Bandwidth, returns to compose the soundtrack, although it’s not as memorable as the work they did for Shooter 1 or 2. There are online leaderboards to conquer and hidden crowns to collect, but after trudging through each sector, going back and replaying them for a few collectibles feels like a chore.

Ultimately, while I was curious to see Q-Games’ take on the shooter genre–especially after they teased everyone with a brief, sidescrolling segment as a bonus stage in Shooter 2–PixelJunk SideScroller ends up coming off as a clunky proof of concept, which is unexpected for a series which has given us some of the most offbeat and memorable games this generation.

[1] Strangely enough, an earlier version of the game does seem to have a weapon indicator (along with a more prominent health bar), as shown in the article screenshots.

Score: 2 out of 5

Recommended if you like:
* PixelJunk Shooter 2‘s bonus stage, “The Road to Dawn”
* Bright colors and a light-hearted shooting experience (assuming you’re playing on Casual)
* Having to retry boss fights over and over

Highlights:
* The Engrish voiceover (“Shieldo!”) whenever you collect a powerup
* Discovering I can smash into the cave walls without dying

Bonus Feature: Gameplay video recording and YouTube uploading. The quality isn’t fantastic and it disables custom soundtracks (Also, the game has custom soundtracks.), but it’s good to see more games including this feature.

Title: PixelJunk SideScroller
Platform: PlayStation 3 (downloadable)
Developer: Q-Games
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Release Date: 10/25/11 (US)

PixelJunk SideScroller was provided for review by Sony. Completed all sectors (including the Last Stage) on Normal. Replayed sector 1 on Hard, and again on Casual to pretend I work for a major outlet. For more info on how VGH approaches game reviews, please read our reviews philosophy.

Video Game Hangover host, Paul Sandhu reviews one of this years biggest games.

Does Skyrim hold up to the scrutiny of someone that hasn’t been a fan of past Bethesda games?

Intro and Outro credits music – Jeremy Soule – Skyrim Main Theme: Buy the Skyrim 4 disc soundtrack @ http://directsong.com

Also, Paul wants to hear from YOU about your adventures in Skyrim. Got an interesting Skyrim story? Let us know in the comments!

Thanks for watching!

For more info on how VGH approaches game reviews, please read our reviews philosophy.