Hardware > Earlier Games
Star Wars: The Old Republic
Review Star Wars: The Old Republic is a massive game with hundreds of hours of game play, so this review is just a chicken scratch on the surface of something we will see develop and grow over months, if not years. Undoubtedly, SWTOR has a solid foundation but does it have enough successful constituent parts to be enduring?
Star Wars …
The Dark Meadow
iGamer I've just been to see the Guillermo del Toro produced cinematic update of Don’t be Afraid of the Dark and it was all shades of Pan's Labyrinth, dark basements and flesh-eating homunculi. The Dark Meadow steals this striking vision and mélanges together mechanisms of FPS combat, role-playing and exploration.
The Dark Meadow iOS …
OnLive Game System cloud gaming console
Review The OnLive cloud gaming service was launched in the UK in September, and I was impressed by the fact that it allowed me to play a wide range of PC games on my Mac – without requiring Boot Camp and a copy of Windows, or any virtualisation trickery.
OnLive cloud gaming system microconsole The USB ports are for charging wireless …
Judge Dredd vs Zombies
Review Cop of the future Judge Dredd has been pounding the streets of Mega City One since 1977, but it took host comic 2000AD's acquisition by software developer Rebellion in 2000 to see the lawman to star in a decent videogame. Dredd has appeared on the PC, the PlayStation and the Xbox, and now he's meting out justice, shot by shot, …
Epoch
iGamer With its heavy arsenal and cover-to-cover, pop-and-shoot gunplay, Epoch looks every inch the Gears of War clone. But look a little closer and you'll discover Uppercut Games' shooter has a great deal more in common with Infinity Blade than Epic's testicular trilogy.
Epoch iOS game screenshot Warbots
Thanks to the Unreal Engine …
Need for Speed: The Run
Review Releasing a driving game into an already congested market is a risky endeavour for any developer. So it follows that releasing two within six months could be considered careless. But to release three within a year, as EA has now done, seems at best illogical and, at worst, pure cannibalistic folly.
Need for Speed: The Run …
Saints Row: The Third
Review You shouldn't laugh at Saints Row: The Third. I mean, what's funny about bludgeoning an old lady to death with a three-foot-long purple dildo? Or kidnapping a gimp-wearing BDSM fetishist and forcing him to to pull your chariot in gladiatorial Pony Play?
Saints Row The Third Hand over the Carats
That's the crux of the Saints …
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
Review Look who it is. Just when you thought that the dust-gathering ornament you used to call a Nintendo games console was in permanent retirement, back it bounds. Why? Because there’s a new Legend of Zelda in town - a game most will have played before in one guise or another, and one that Nintendo always finds a way to freshen up. …
Assassin's Creed: Revelations
Review It might just be me, but as Ezio Auditore effortlessly scales yet another tower, it’s hard to shake the feeling we've been here before. I know it's the continuation of a story arc, and I know that the game's engine – as already rolled out in last year's Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood – is already adequate enough in its animation …
Muvizu animation suite
Review Digimania's Muvizu is free 3D animation software running on the Unreal engine. It allows you to create movies and even upload them directly to YouTube or Facebook from the application. Considering how much Autodesk Maya or 3DS Max will set you back and how many man hours it will take you to do the simplest of animations (and …
Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary Edition
Review Love it or hate it, it's impossible to ignore Halo's legacy. With the exception of Super Mario, no other videogame series has been as critical to the success of its target platform - or as influential on the videogames industry as a whole.
Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary Edition Urban jungle
Arguably the most important …
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Review Skyrim is set in the land of the Nords, a craggy treacherous landscape that reminds me of George R R Martin's series A Song of Ice and Fire and has the same epic scale. After the King of Skyrim is assassinated the land is plunged into civil war and the region has become severed from the rest of the empire. The game starts by …
The Adventures of Tintin: the Game
Review Until I was five, my dad worked at Cern and we lived in the Jura Mountains across the France-Switzerland border. At weekends my mum would take us to Jouets Weber, the largest toyshop in Geneva. It stocked a large number of Tintin books, which my mum translated to me at bedtime.
The Adventures of Tin Tin Take a hit and throw up …
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
Review Look who’s back. Despite well-documented development team difficulties after the release of Modern Warfare 2, a feeling of increasing apathy for a franchise already over milked and fierce competition from EA in the shape of Battlefield 3, it seems you just can’t keep a good - and immensely profitable - series down.
Modern …
Goldeneye 007: Reloaded
Review Here we go again. Back to bungie jumping from the dam at Arkhangelsk. Back to sneaking across the snowy fields around the Severnaya satellite installation. And back to dodging fierce crossfire on the gantries of an antenna cradle.
Goldeneye 007 Reloaded The sound of silencer
After almost 15 years, these sequences remain some …
Sonic Generations
Review Sonic the Hedgehog celebrates his 25th anniversary this year and consequently, Sega is touting yet another title where the blue-speedster takes centre stage. According to the company, Sonic Generations broke Sega's pre-order records as the most anticipated Sonic title in 20 years. Hmm, and there I was thinking the heroic …
Battlefield 3
Review Even the staunchest opponent of all things games would have been hard pushed to avoid the determined advertising campaign waged on us by EA of late. TV spots, billboards, websites, magazines, sides of buses, newspapers, even logos on tanks in one recent London stunt, all liberally displaying brand Battlefield.
To say the war …
Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception
Review Naughty Dog has created a monster; I remember when I first snapped up the original Uncharted, back when Sony was still looking for its first killer PS3 title. Resistance: Fall of Man had been mooted as such a title but ultimately disappointed, Motorstorm wowed us with its graphics but was limited by its genre, Heavenly Sword …
Batman: Arkham City
Review Hung upside down over a vat of acid or strapped to a conveyor belt inching towards a blast furnace, Batman could always rely on technology to help him pull off an unlikely escape. That is if he... could... just... reach... his... utility belt, of course.
Batman: Arkham City 'If this is a consular ship, then where is the …
Forza 4
Review Driving simulators - you either get them or you don't. For those of you who can't tell your carburettors from your crankshafts, there's perhaps little chance that anything written here will convince you to invest. Shame, because Forza 4 is perhaps the most accessible driving sim yet designed. It has the depth demanded by the …
Ace Combat: Assault Horizon
Review “For good or for ill, air mastery is the supreme expression of military power,” said Churchill, “and fleets and armies, however vital and important, must accept a subordinate rank.”
Ace Combat: Assault Horizon Taken under the wing
That may be true in the real world, but when it comes to videogames air combat has long accepted …
Dark Souls
Review Plunging from a treacherous rampart, slowly succumbing to the poisonous bite or bludgeoned by a monstrous ice giant – Dark Souls wants you dead. And it doesn't care how.
Dark Souls Shanking of the colossus
That should come as no surprise, of course. Anyone who dared play last year's Demon's Souls knows all too well that death …
Toshiba Qosmio X770 17.3in 3D gaming notebook
Review When Toshiba UK announced the launch of the Qosmio X770 3D – a new gaming laptop with stereoscopic 3D graphics and a 17.3in HD screen, I immediately thought: could this be an Alienware killer? Toshiba has been said to lag behind other manufacturers when it comes to high-end gaming laptops, but after spending time with the X770 I …
id Software's Rage
Review Is it an RPG? Is it a first-person shooter? This is a question which reverberates around my mind while I wander through Rage’s wastes. Why the confusion? Because id’s latest shooter hovers somewhere in the middle of these genres, a chimera with, oddly enough, lashings of Motorstorm-esque racing thrown in for good measure.
Rage …
Ico & Shadow of the Colossus Collection
Review Can games be ahead of their time? I’ve heard it said of musicians, film directors, even comedians but rarely attributed to any person, or any particular release, within the games industry. Perhaps it’s time we started? Take Ico, for example, originally released for PS2 in Europe in 2001 to critical praise but scant commercial …
Rise of Nightmares
Review A spine-tingling unease, an oppressive sense of dread, an irrepressible fear – dusting off and firing up the Kinect sensor can fill any self respecting gamer with a profound foreboding. Since its release almost a year ago, Child of Eden stands as the only hardcore game to shine its - admittedly brilliant - light through the …
F1 2011
Review It’s a funny old sport, F1: an ever changing maelstrom of rule adjustments and technology upgrades, ensuring any given season is entirely disparate from the next. Imagine if FIFA suddenly deemed that football’s throw-ins were to become kick-ins, before adjusting the rule once more the next.
That’s precisely the issue facing F1 …
Gears of War 3
Review When it comes to goodbyes, Gears of War 3 proves that parting truly is the sweetest of sorrows. A swansong of bewildering scope and ambition, it's a near-flawless conclusion to Epic's highly acclaimed series.
Gears of War 3 Fire in the hole
With only a handful of games able to rival it for intensity, action and drama, and …
Resistance 3
Review It's hard to know whether to blame its own over-bearing derivation or the over-saturation of FPS games in general: either way, Resistance 3 is an anticlimatic end to a series that has struggled to rise above mediocrity.
Resistance 3 Holey smoke
That's hardly surprising. The greatest achievement of the first two Resistance …
Dead Island
Review Sweaty locals and voodoo always remind me of Angel Heart and I was as confused as Mickey Rourke after watching Dead Island's appalling intro. Seriously, who says "git" these days? Must be all those red pills and JD. This may explain the reverse time trailer I saw a few months back, which mislead me into thinking there might be …
Driver San Francisco
Review Defusing bombs, rounding up drug runners and saving damsels in distress, just a sample of the heroic acts possible while behind the wheel of a high performance vehicle – who knew? Driver San Francisco is a game that rather lacks any semblance of plausibility, yet holds such a penchant for the ridiculous that you'll be amused …
appToyz appBlaster
iGamer Gaming peripherals have a bad reputation, and not without good reason. From the sublime Steel Battalion controller to every ridiculous Wii peripheral, these plastic appendages have one thing in common: they make gamers look sublimely ridiculous.
appToyz appBlaster Point and shoot: appToyz appBlaster
Even those which actually …
Bodycount
Review In the ever deepening reservoir that is the FPS genre, most games ultimately fall into one of two categories. There are those which encourage thought, exploration, tactical nous, micro-management of resources and, of course, a good shot. We’re talking the likes of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Half-Life 2, BioShock and even Modern …
Dell Alienware M18x 18.4in gaming notebook
Review Last year, Dell added to its Alienware laptop family and simultaneously expanded the definition of ultra-portables with the tiny-beefcake M11x. This year's new addition, the flagship M18x, now expands the other end of the spectrum.
Dell Alienware M18x Big player: Dell's Alienware M18x
Labelling this colossus a desktop …
appToyz appWheel
iGamer “For fuck's sake, Mum. I asked for the appBlaster; not the fucking appWheel. You've totally fucked Christmas. No wonder dad's shacked up with that 26-year-old stunner. I fucking hate you!”
I can picture it now. Christmas morning 2011 – surly, ungrateful teenager versus distraught, nonplussed mum. Not that I've even tried the …
Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Review Forget the lacklustre sequel Invisible War, Deus Ex: Human Revolution is the true, worthy successor to Deus Ex, a breathtaking paragon of the genre the original helped define.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution Bringing more to the table
Yes, there's little novelty in its genre conceits. Hacking and circumvention, augmentations, …
From Dust
Review Microsoft’s Summer of Arcade has become something of an institution these last few years, ushering in the release of some of the best seen download-only games yet seen; the likes of Limbo, Braid, Shadow Complex and last week’s Bastion to name but a few. Up next is From Dust, a release with a pedigree all of its own in the gaming …
Call of Juarez: The Cartel
Review In theory, The Cartel's contemporary setting is a wise move for the Call of Juarez series. The moderate success of the first two Western-themed games was instantly undone when Red Dead Redemption moseyed into the overlooked genre, rounded up the pretenders and rode them out of town. By relocating to the present day, developer …
Air Conflicts: Secret Wars
Review In recent years aerial combat games have been in free fall. The genre stalled after the seminal Il-2 Sturmovick and has struggled to pull out of a seemingly irrecoverable nosedive. But, contrary to their dubious quality, the continuing popularity of the Ace Combat and Hawx series proves interest remains sky high for the genre. …
Ion Audio iCade arcade-style iPad cabinet
Geek Treat of the Week Let's get the negative out of the way right from the start: the iCade is a bit on the crap side.
But then that's kind of how it should be.
Ion iCade Ion's iCade: beep, beep, beep.... schboom
As if you couldn't guess from the pics, the iCade is an iPad stand that mimics the arcade game cabinets of yesteryear. Like them, it's …
Captain America: Super Soldier
Review Games based around movies have a reputation (most would say justly deserved) of seldom living up to their silver screen counterparts, while those timed to debut simultaneously with their movie counterparts have an even worse success to failure ratio.
It might not come as a massive shock to anyone out there then, that Captain …
Marathon for iPad
iGamer To hear PC gamers talk about how first-person shooters don't work on consoles because the machines don't have mice, you'd think that's how it always was.
Not a bit of it. A lot of us playing in the early to mid-1990s on the first FPS games made do with just two handfuls of keys.
Marathon Marathon: back from the early 1990s in …
