Everybody loves trains. They chug, bellow steam, and the refreshment cart serves delicious lukewarm tea. Trains are inherently fun. Children know it. Railfans know it. Rod Stewart knows it. Railway Empire entails connecting cities with railroads, setting up signals, and both purchasing and upgrading trains along with their accompanying carriages. Nonstop train action – Railway …
To simply put it, House Flipper is a game in which you renovate properties, cleaning them up, decorating, buying furniture, and even smashing down walls before putting your hard graft up for auction. It may sound like a peculiar set-up, but it’s the very epitome of a guilty pleasure. Your venture in house flipping begins …
If you’re going to crib something, it pays to crib from the best. This horizontal space shooter certainly doesn’t make a mistake there, borrowing heavily from genre high notes R-Type and Gradius. Created by an ex-Ubisoft employee, it has its own ideas too, helping to overstep grounds for plagiarism. Like those officially cited sources, Rigid …
This randomised dungeon-crawling RPG is drenched in arcade sensibilities, including combat centred around twin-stick shooting, simplified menus, and a two-player mode. Comparisons with the classic coin-op Gauntlet aren’t far off the mark, a fact helped by the appearance of enemy generators later on. A gravelly-voiced narrator telling us not to shoot food would have sealed …
Robot Squad Simulator X – Xbox One The concept behind Robot Squad Simulator X is so perfectly suited for a video game that it makes us wonder why nobody has drawn upon it before. Here, you’re tasked with controlling various robots and drones as they undergo such dangerous pursuits as bomb disposal, crash investigation and …
Just like its predecessor, this Game Boy-style pixel art platformer prides itself on being tougher than frozen toffee. A typical stage features spiked walls and ceilings, projectile spitting turrets, and floors coated in fast-moving saw blades. Our vitamin-rich hero dies with one hit, and as there are no checkpoints, it can be a relief to …
Critics were doubtlessly in a quandary when 2006’s Jaw Unleashed landed for review. The vastly belated movie tie-in came from a publisher with an iffy track record (Majesco), had no pre-launch hype, and was far removed from the PS2’s typical fare. Despite all this, it was a fun diversion. What’s a journalist to do? Give …
One thing I’ve noticed, and quickly grown to dislike, about PC simulation games converted to console is that their menus are rarely redesigned. It’s painfully obvious they were originally designed with mouse controls in mind, while the text is usually too small for a typical living room TV. Ultimate Fishing Simulator falls foul of this, …
Being as far removed from a typical adventure game set-up as imaginable, STONE throws you into the role of an Australian koala with a fondness for weed, alcohol and casual swearing. The docile detective wakes up in his pigsty of a flat and realises Cockie, the love of his life, is gone. Yes, you guessed …
What does simple mean? You have a really simple goal in Dungeon of the Endless. Find the exit, and transport your crystal there, so that you can move up to the next level. Seems easy. Seems simple. It’s not that simple and it’s not that easy. It’s not easy at all. Every level consists of …
Publisher eastasiasoft has successfully managed to carve a niche on the digital storefronts, releasing arcade-style pixel art shooter at impulse price points. Task Force Kampas is their latest, being a vertical shooter with a choice of offbeat characters, each with a perk. In the absence of anything resembling a plot, we’re left to assume they’re …
Rumour has it that when Microsoft showed Rare’s Kameo: Elements of Power to the gaming press, ahead of the Xbox 360’s launch, they were asked to go easy on the ‘f word’. It was believed the very notion of playing as a fairy would be a huge turn-off for most gamers, being the opposite of …
Everyone loves a good board game – the perfect way to take our petty gripes and frustrations out on those we love. It’s no secret or surprise that they’ve gone through a renaissance in the last ten years. Modern examples are often fun, snappy, and varied thanks to interesting themes. El Dorado sees you trek …
The premise for this arcade-style shooter sounds like the greatest Futurama episode that never was. After the animatronic robots at a cowboy-themed amusement park go haywire, a rootin’ tootin’ cowpoke – the titular Dixie Dash – is called in to save the day. Why the metal menaces were given live ammo in the first place …
Half Past Fate is an adorable 2D/3D rom-com adventure, following the lives of six characters as they find each other in their unusual ways. It time hops throughout the course of 8 years, so you’ll need to keep up and stay on top of things. As someone who’s not usually partial to rom-coms, and can …