Showing posts with label Open World. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Open World. Show all posts

Friday, 14 June 2013

REVIEW - State of Decay (XBLA)


More Brains!

Zombies are everywhere, and I am not talking about walking our streets in search of brains. I am speaking of the colossal popularity of the undead in modern entertainment. With a plethora of recent zombie games on consoles (Naughty Dog's The Last of Us, and Techland's Dead Island Riptide), MMOs on PC (Dayz and War Z) and a big budget movie in cinemas (World War Z), it would seem that shuffling cadavers on the hunt for human flesh are inescapable.

As a fan of post-apocalyptic scenarios, I have been eagerly awaiting this new open world action RPG from Undead Labs. The chance to explore a sandbox environment, sneaking down ruined city streets, looting chests and shelves for vital supplies, dealing with other human survivors and, of course, caving in the heads of those pesky flesh eaters, is an exciting prospect. Dead Island has been the closest I have come to achieving these survivalist fantasies so far, but now State of Decay takes the crown. It is, without a doubt, the most satisfying survival zombie experience ever created. But it is not without its flaws.


Saturday, 19 January 2013

REVIEW - Retro City Rampage (XBLA / PS3)



Observant readers of this site will notice that I have already reviewed the PC version of Retro City Rampage, giving it a fairly harsh score based on both my experience playing the game and the incredible disappointment I felt after waiting several years for it to finally materialise. Now that the dust has settled and a new Xbox Live Arcade version has arrived I felt it was time to come back to it with a fresh set of eyes and no preconceptions. While the core game remains the same, there are many notable improvements to the gameplay and as such I had a great deal more fun with it than the PC version.

The brainchild of just one man, Brian Provinciano, Retro City Rampage started life as a homebrew NES game based on Grand Theft Auto. Entitled Grandtheftendo, it soon grew far too big for its hardware boots and so Brian made the logical choice to produce it for PC instead. With the limitations removed he aimed bigger and soon a whole sandbox world was born. He wanted to stick closely to the NES roots so began adding references to classic 8-bit games. This soon incorporated TV and movie references from the same era and, as more and more nods to classic shows and games were added, Retro City Rampage was soon a full blown parody game.