In NeverDead, you play as an immortal demon hunter who can tear off his own head and toss it around like Michael Jordan shooting free throws, or yank off limbs and toss them across the room to shoot out-of-reach enemies with his own severed, gun-wielding arm. It’s the driving mechanic behind NeverDead, and a fun, occasionally creative one that’ll be the chief draw for most people, but while the game is a solid, quirky and surprisingly enjoyable third-person shooter/slasher, it’s let down by infuriating difficulty spikes and repetitive design.

After losing his wife and being cursed with immortality by the demon Astaroth 500 years ago, Bryce Boltzmann has roamed the land, now hunting evil with the help of sexy mortal government handler Arcadia and brooding over a glass of scotch. When a teenage pop songstress is targeted by demons and an apocalypse starts a-brewin’, Bryce puts his skills to use, blasting and slashing his way through gruesome monsters and losing his head a lot in the process. A third-person shoot/slice-’em-up, NeverDead has you jump into Bryce’s shoes and use firepower, a hefty blade and the gift of detachable limbs to save the day.
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Bryce can’t be killed, so in lieu of death to pose a challenge for gamers, his head and limbs can be knocked off by assaulting enemies. Get a leg or an arm chopped off and you’ll have to hop around to find and reattach it. Commando rolling over severed limbs allows Bryce to pop them back on, or you can wait for the regen timer to fill up and regrow whatever’s missing (along with clothes, strangely) with a push of the L3 button. If you get your head lopped off, you’ll be rolling around as a severed melon, aiming to reposition yourself at the gaping neck wound of your body to reattach yourself. Making things tougher, vacuum-like critters scuttle around the environment, attempting to suck up your limbs and head before you can put them back in place. If they suck up your head, you have a last-chance quick-time event in which to save yourself – hit ‘X’ at the right time and you’ll be spat back out, but if not, you’ll be digesting in the guts of the monster for eternity (the only way to get a ‘Game Over’, outside of letting your AI partner die).

Of course, being able to survive dismemberment and beheading has its upsides, too. At any time, you can have Bryce tear off his own head and throw it into vents or onto higher platforms in search of collectibles or previously unreachable switches. You can tear either arm off and toss it away, where you can continue firing bullets into enemies with your detached limb, or detonate it from afar. It’s a tremendously silly and rather fun idea that’s put to use in rather creative ways in early levels as you send your head on a mini platforming adventure, or during boss fights where you toss gun-toting limbs into an enemy’s mouth and shoot them apart from the inside, but the dismembering mechanic does have a few kinks that make it a bit less than ideal at times.
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Being able to tear off your own head and use it like a basketball is a fantastic bit of daft fun, but it’d be more useful if the game embraced that cartoonish silliness and let you throw it further, or gave you more opportunity to use it creatively. The arc of range is small, and the camera angle often makes it tough to see your angle and target, meaning you’ll usually only bother using throwing your limbs where instructed, and even then it might take a few tries to nail the shot. Collectibles usually have an ideal spot in mind for you to start noggin-tossin’, rather than being able to angle a shot from anywhere you can spot the valuable trinket, so aside from pre-set puzzles and collectibles, there’s never really much cause to use the limb-popping mechanic. As the game wears on, the developers give you less and less opportunity to use your head and limbs for anything, and it’s a gameplay element that soon frustrates more often than it entertains.

At times it feels like the game is embracing the mechanic too much in the wrong way, to compensate for the fact that the main character can’t be killed. As a compromise, the difficulty is often ramped up and Bryce’s body becomes about as stable as a broken GI Joe figure; while it’s funny the first time, it can be intensely frustrating for your head and limbs to explode off your body at the slightest nudge from an enemy when you’re trying to get somewhere or hit an objective. It leads to too many utterly infuriating moments late on in the game, where you’re bombarded with tonnes of enemies, your limbs and head getting knocked off instantly with one hit the moment you put yourself back together. In the last couple of levels you spend more time as a severed head being pinballed between overpowered hordes of monsters and futilely attempting to roll and hop back to your body across unnavigable terrain than actually doing anything worthwhile.
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It’s a shame the last couple of boss levels drag NeverDead into controller-smashing rage territory, since up until then, it’s a solid third-person shooter with enough fun ideas and Japanese quirkiness to keep things entertaining. Sure, it gets a bit repetitive and formulaic – almost every level introduces you to a new environment, seals it off and has you destroy enemy spawn points and any monsters dotted around before the doors will open to let you move on to the next area, with a ‘throw the switch’ puzzle dotted here and there – but that aside, it’s an incredibly fun and well put together shoot-em-up/hack and slash romp. Added in to make Bryce a little more vulnerable, his human partner Arcadia can be killed, leaving you to revive her if she gets knocked down. Leave her incapacitated for too long and she’ll shuffle off into the afterlife and it’s ‘Game Over’. Thankfully the AI is pretty robust, and Arcadia proves herself far more self-sufficient and less annoying than most computer partners.

There’s a fun bit of Max Payne DNA in there – you can duel wield guns and switch and swap between weapon set-ups to your liking, while one of the many power-up perks slows time when you’re in danger – and almost every part of the environment is destructible in some way, leaving you able to shoot pillars and topple them onto enemies and so forth. You can switch between your arsenal of handguns, SMGs, shotguns, etc., to wield a giant butterfly blade at any time, too – handy, since some enemies are impervious to bullets. The sword is controlled with a surprisingly intuitive bit of analogue stick movement – hold the stick in any direction to bring the blade back and ready a strike, then push in the opposite direction to slice. It allows for full 360 degree precision, even if the game never really requires it and all swordplay is handled just as well by randomly, rapidly flinging the stick every which way. A perks system, which allows you to buy power-ups to boost your weapon accuracy, jump distance, sprint speed and so on, gives you a certain number of slots in which to drop new abilities.
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It all works far better than it should, and while it has its awkward moments, the collective combat mechanics are just enough to make the repetitive level formula forgivable. There’s also a decent array of diverse and sufficiently disgusting enemies, from the football-sized vacuum critters and blade-headed creatures, which look like a cross between Oddworld’s Scrabs and a Silent Hill monster, to gigantic brutes which devastate both you and the environment with ease. There’s a dash of distinctly Japanese goofy weirdness, both in the game’s story and the between-level sections; you head back to Arcadia’s safehouse apartment, where you can interact with the environment in silly ways for XP bonuses, tossing your disembodied head in the washing machine, rifling through Arcadia’s underwear drawer or shooting a hole in the wall and throwing it through into the chimney chute to snag a collectible in the fireplace.

It’s all pretty daft, and while the plot isn’t the most satisfying narrative you’ll find in the game, there’s more than enough goofy charm to make it a pretty enjoyable adventure romp, delivered through pretty gorgeous visuals. There’s an undercooked multiplayer ‘battle arena’ mode that’s barely worth a second glance, but the main game itself is well worth a look; it’s flawed, repetitive and might occasionally inspire blinding rage with its difficulty ramps in the last hour, but even so, the experience is a fun one on the whole, peppered with enough solid action and quirky mechanics to make it an entertainingly daft weekend of gaming.

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NeverDead is available to buy now on PS3 and Xbox 360.
Click here to buy it from Amazon.co.uk.

If you don’t own an iPad or iPhone (or even if you do), last year’s release of Denki and UTV Ignition’s party strategy game Quarrel might’ve flown completely under your radar. Now Xbox 360 owners have a belated chance to check the game out as Quarrel hits XBLA, and this immensely fun blend of Risk and Scrabble is a surprise treat that’s a must for gaming wordsmiths.

As Quarrel kicks off, you’re dropped onto a game board divided into coloured plots of land, all split up equally between you and your opponents. You start out with a number of troops on each section of land, some squads slightly smaller than others. The stronger your forces in a plot of land, the more likely they’ll win in battle, with the aim being to take on smaller enemy forces which border your land, annihilate them and claim the territory for yourself, repeating the process until you’ve achieved total domination.
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So far, so Risk. But where Quarrel differs is in its use of clever wordplay as a substitute for the dice-rolling statistical probability of Risk’s battles. When you start a fight with bordering lands in Quarrel, a Countdown-style jumbled eight letter anagram appears at the bottom of the screen. Each soldier in your plot of land represents a letter space for you to use – eight soldiers means you can serve up an eight letter word or less from the letter jumble, but if you only have one or two, your word options are severely limited. Each letter has a point score, like in Scrabble, and within the time limit, you have to make the highest scoring word possible from the anagram letters with your available troops. Invade enemy land and score a higher word than them and you’ll take their land, moving your troops in to occupy it. Successfully defend against an attacking opponent and you’ll whittle down the amount of soldiers they have, taking prisoners to use for yourself if you fend off a squad bigger than you.

The strategy of Risk is carried over perfectly. When you take over a piece of territory with a squad, the majority of your troops take up residence in your new plot of land, leaving a lone soldier behind to guard the other space. If you’re on a hot streak, you might be tempted to push ahead and keep ploughing through into enemy territory to grab all you can with your turn, but the further you move ahead, the more thinly your numbers are stretched, and it might leave you open to slaughter for the next opponent. Reinforcements drop in after every turn, and you can move troops from one of your spaces into a bordering bit of land to reinforce weak spots. It becomes a balancing game, learning when to quit while your ahead and build your defenses, but knowing when to strike before stronger adversaries have a chance to regroup.
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The Scrabble element is a fantastic inclusion, too, and while Risk was all about having greater numbers and sheer luck on your side, that’s only a part of Quarrel. Sure, it’s definitely helpful to have seven or eight soldiers in every plot of land to give you more letters to play with, but if you’re a cunning wordsmith or have sharp eyes and quick fingers, then you can often best your opponent with less letters than they have. Someone might come at you with eight soldiers, but though the temptation is to go for the longest word possible, it’s the letter score that counts; if you’re quick enough to spot a high-scoring four letter word, you could still beat a larger opposing force, helping even the odds and make the game more fun for everyone (and challenging, too, especially as the timer ticks down and your brain’s vocabulary vanishes under the pressure).

If two players score the same, whoever answered first wins. You’re also given a ‘level up’ meter – the more word points you score and the more land you grab, the higher it climbs, and with each level, you get an extra backup soldier to use for an extra letter in battle. Even if it’s not your turn, you can still guess words or try to nail the anagram for more points and units to use when your turn rolls around, helping make the wait between turns more eventful. Even losing has its benefits, helping keep you on your toes and teaching you new words you might’ve missed. While you’ll be pretty screwed if you go up against Crossword champions, in general company it’s a well-rounded, incredibly fun mash-up that anyone can jump into and have a chance of winning.
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The game is split into a varied selection of single player modes and online multiplayer. There’s no local multiplayer, but understandably so – it’d be incredibly easy to cheat if you could see your friend’s word choice being typed in on-screen. The single player section is surprisingly robust: Quick Match speedily sets up a single match against an AI opponent who matches your skill level; Tutorial does what you’d expect, with a special match to introduce you to the rules; Domination gives you a long-form campaign to play through, as you strive to conquer 12 increasingly tough islands, one match for each, some against a single opponent, some against up to three; Showdown is a 9-round series of one-on-one battles; ‘Challenges’ pits you against opponents, but gives you specific challenges, like winning five word battles in a row, and Make Match lets you put together a custom match of your choosing.

As robust and entertaining as the single player modes can be, they’re a little more troublesome than multiplayer at times. The order in which players take their turns isn’t randomized, and the game always seems to make you take your turn after all the other AI players. Sometimes it feels like you’re missing out on the strategic advantage of getting the first move, and being last makes waiting for your shot a bit of a chore. While the ability for all players to take a stab at the Countdown Conundrum-style anagram while other players fight helps keep the tedium between turns to a minimum, it’d be nice if you could skip the victory animations, at least for the single player game to speed things along. The challenge level ramps up a bit too unfairly in later stages, too; some opponents are simply programmed to have a flawless vocubulary and impeccable speed, and it’s no fun going up against an AI enemy who almost never fails to nail the 8 letter anagrams.
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Thankfully the majority of those niggling issues vanish if you take your game online, where you can take on players of a similar rank, try to find a random game or play with friends. The online multiplayer brings out the best in the game, and when you’re up against actual people, who can fumble just as easily as you, it makes the challenge much fairer and more fun, and the engaging strategy and wordplay at the game’s core make it an addictive and ridiculously entertaining game with a cute and colourful cartoon visual style. What’s even better is that it’s available at the bargain price of 400 Microsoft Points, making it an absolute steal.

The single player mode has a few unfortunate foibles, but if you take it online, Quarrel is a quirky and incredibly fun fusion of Risk and Scrabble. If you’re a sucker for word games and are aching for a new XBLA title to scratch that itch, then Quarrel is a must buy, especially for such a great, low price.

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Quarrel is now available to buy on the Xbox Live Marketplace, priced at 400 Microsoft Points.

If you’ve ever dreamt of a world where you could capture intergalactic fugitive gorillas by tossing electrified hula hoops at them, Wanted Corp might just be the game for you. Unfortunately, goofy set-up aside, it’s yet another serviceable, but forgettable top-down shooter with some interesting mechanics that’re sadly overshadowed by repetitive gameplay.

Wanted Corp puts you in the formidable shoes of moronically-named, Hulk Hogan-mustachioed bounty hunter MadDogg and his partner Irina. MadDogg makes use of beefy cannons and other assorted destructive weaponry, while Irina has psychic powers and can summon lightning or illuminate dark areas like a human glowstick. While most twin-stick shooters focus on frantic, fast-paced ‘kill everything possible’ gameplay, Wanted Corp supplements that action with a little strategy: Sure, you can blast everything to death, but you earn more cash if you capture the escaped convicts and transport them back to home base – an often tougher option since you’ll be contending with attacking enemies whilst trying to tag and bag your bounty.
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MadDogg, as the more brutish half of the duo, has a melee attack at his disposal, along with grenades and an assortment of firearms, and has to slowly wear down and wade towards incapacitated enemies in order to mark them for capture. Irina, as the more sprightly, graceful of the two, has the gift of telekinesis which allows her to throw debris around or flip distant switches. She can also summon a shield and toss out ‘strength rings’ – psychic laser hula hoops which bounce off walls and instantly imprison enemies upon contact, making them an easy bounty or simply keeping lesser enemies occupied while you focus on more immediately dangerous foes. It’s a fun mechanic, and the bounty system is a nice idea, adding a modicum of strategy – do you take the tougher route, capturing live enemies for larger rewards, or settle for less cash and just blast everything in sight? – but it only goes so far, and the larger game gets repetitive very quickly, not helped by clunky AI and awkward targeting controls.

You can team up with a friend through online co-op, and it’s the only real way to get a decent amount of enjoyment out of the game. The single player AI can be pretty idiotic at times, bounding into harm’s way against devastating enemies or wading head-first into turret fire. It becomes even more frustrating when you factor in the revive system: It costs a sizable amount of money to revive a downed ally, leaving you short-changed when it comes time to upgrade your stuff, and resuscitating a partner can be a near-impossible feat if enemies are still around thanks to the revive counter, which instantly resets to zero if you’re struck by an attack. Making things worse are the awkward controls; switching weapons and issuing orders to AI partners can be cumbersome, while the reticle targeting is never particularly smooth or intuitive. In a rare twist, the optional Move controls do make the targeting system more comfortable, but the ‘draw a shape to select Irena’s spells’ addition feels a bit too gimmicky.
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If you’re playing with a friend, things get more enjoyable, but sadly there’s not enough variety to make Wanted Corp stand out from the pack. Combine the clumsy controls and occasionally wonky AI with the lack of wider variety (each of the eight levels is a linear ‘deal with every enemy’ affair), the annoyingly overused, poorly delivered voice clips for each character and the drab backdrops and Wanted Corp never manages to be more than a serviceable, occasionally fun shooter.

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Wanted Corp is now available to buy on the PlayStation Network Store.

The only thing more played out than twin-stick shooters on PSN are including zombies in, well, anything. With dual-stick shoot-’em-up games not exactly in short supply (and more coming seemingly weekly) and the shambling undead used to undeath in movies, comic books, games, TV shows and probably breakfast cereals, feminine hygiene products and anything else you can think of, the combination of the two isn’t exactly one that should have many people leaping for joy, especially after Dead Nation, Burn Zombie Burn, Zombie Apocalypse, Dead Ops Arcade and all manner of zombie shooters covered that ground pretty extensively. Thankfully, All Zombies Must Die is a pleasant surprise, and while you might well be sick to death of shooting shuffling corpses, developer Doublesix add in just enough layered gameplay mechanics, personality and humour to help distance their game from the horde of mindless zombie shooters.

Dropping you into a city overrun with the undead, All Zombies Must Die initially seems like just another top-down shooter, but soon reveals itself to be more a mixture of Dead Nation and Deathspank. Sure, a massive portion of the gameplay is dedicated to firing into endless crowds of zombies and hacking your way through throngs of enemies with a chainsaw, but the game also has a significant amount of RPG DNA coursing through its veins. Your character earns XP with each kill, you sinks skill points into their strength, speed, etc., you’ll get fetch quests as you explore and there’s a fun and rather versatile weapon crafting loot system to boot.
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Flaming zombies drop wood, killing a certain amount of sonic zombies nets you a megaphone, and so on, and each collected component can be used in your home base to modify your standard weapons into, say, a flaming chainsaw or sonic shotgun. Since raw materials like wood play heavily into the crafting and missions, it’s handy that you can use the environment to change the undead types and collect items as and when you need them; setting a zombie ablaze and guiding him into a crowd creates a horde of flaming zombies for you to harvest, setting off a cop car’s siren transforms those in a certain radius into sonic zombies and shepherding them through toxic waste creates mutant superzombies. It’s a neat idea, and the crafting mechanics add a nice layer of depth to a simplistic, overworn genre. The quest dialogue – while a little too heavy on the meta ‘we’re well aware that we’re characters in a video game’ humour – offers a dash of absurd wit and a few genuine laughs, and there’s a nice sense of cartoony personality to the game, story-wise and visually.

Unfortunately, even with the added RPG elements, the fun of blasting through zombies in a top-down shooter still becomes repetitive pretty quickly. The quests are never more complex than having to kill a certain number of zombie types or grabbing a single story item, which soon gets old. The town of Deadhill is split into a handful of distinct, interconnected hub areas – a suburban street area, a shopping mall, and so on – but the over-reliance on backtracking throughout all those areas to grab a certain item becomes incredibly tedious. The crafting system is fun, and the outlandish modifications are a treat, but outside of the shotgun and chainsaw, the weapons are too underpowered to be of much use, as are some of the other playable characters. Hopping into the game with friends might keep things a little more engaging, but while there’s 4-player co-op, there’s no online option at all.
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All Zombies Must Die introduces some interesting mechanics to a tired and overexposed genre, but the fun still only lasts so long before things become repetitive and tiresome. It’s let down by its simplistic and eventually tedious nature, but if you’re after another top-down, twin-stick shooter, All Zombies Must Die has just enough fresh ideas to make it worth a look.

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All Zombies Must Die is now available to buy on the PlayStation Network Store and Xbox Live Marketplace.

While the twin-stick shooter has become quite possibly the most bountiful genre on downloadable platforms over the past couple of years, tower defense games are starting to take a shot at the titles as of late. Whether it’s Pixeljunk Monsters, Toy Soldiers, South Park Lets Go Tower Defense Play, or Trenched/Iron Brigade, there’s a tonne of titles out there to scratch your tower defense itch. Trendy Entertainment have thrown their hat into the ring with tower defense/RPG hybrid Dungeon Defenders, and while its fusion of role-playing hack-and-slash mechanics and versatile trap and turret mechanics make it a fun game with plenty to offer, it’s a game let down by its unbalanced difficulty, plodding single-player pace and occasionally awkward console presentation.

Blending traditional tower defense ‘set up turrets to protect your base against enemy hordes’ gameplay with the stat-boosting and fantasy tropes of RPG games, Dungeon Defenders takes place in an ancient land where a great evil has been defeated by legendary warriors and locked away in Eternia Crystals, bringing peace to the world. When the warriors head off in search of adventure and leave their rambunctious young’uns in charge of the castle’s up-keep, the kids accidentally unleash untold nasties upon the realm, who’ll stop at nothing to crack open the Eternia Crystals and free the dormant evil.
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As you might expect from a tower defense game, you’re given a planning phase in which you have all the time in the world (though initially limited resources) to set up defensive traps and barricades wherever you like to protect your precious crystals from the impending waves of incoming attackers. When everything’s in place, you activate the attack phase, which opens the door for hordes of adversaries to trundle in through gates (a handy menu gives you a vague idea of which enemies to expect and how many ahead of time). In the attack portion of the game, as well as relying on your traps and barriers, you can take on enemies yourself third-person action RPG style, hacking away at flying critters and pesky orcs with your character’s unique weapons and skills. You can still lay down, repair and upgrade defensive structures after the attack phase has begun, but they’ll take much longer to construct, and if an enemy attacks you while you’re building, you’ll have to start the process all over.

The aim of the game is to set up your defenses in the most efficient choke-points, where spinning blade barriers, harpoon cannons and such can slow and kill waves of foes long before they get near your crystals. You start out only with the resources to build a few simple barriers, but after each wave, you can loot refilled chests and scoop up mana and XP from downed enemies to fund your next round, gaining a more formidable set of armour, equipment and defenses with each wave. The ability to lay down turrets and barriers wherever you like offers up pretty versatile options for defense, welcoming and encouraging strategic thinking, especially as things get tougher in later rounds.
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The game tosses in a dash of RPG in its character system. You’re given a choice of four fantasy game stand-bys when you start: The Apprentice (the spell-flinging mage), Squire (the melee-based warrior), Huntress (the long-range archer), and Monk (the non-Tony Shalhoub character who uses a mixture of melee and magic expertise). Each character has their own unique and distinctly useful abilities, and level up as you progress, allowing you to sink points into their stats in an RPG style – stats which cover the usual stuff like speed and attack power, but also allow for more strength, resilience and attack range for your defensive structures, too. The massive range of variety in terms of character abilities means there’s a huge amount of room for diverse strategies and character progression, while the expansive array of armour and weapons that are dropped mean that loot collecting addicts will be well catered for (though it’s a shame that no matter which of the different armour or weapons you equip, your character’s physical appearance always looks exactly the same).

The sheer amount of variety and surprising amount of gameplay depth helps make Dungeon Defenders an incredibly fun and rather addictive tower defense/RPG fusion. The slightly cell-shaded cartoony graphics look great and manage to squeeze a decent amount of variety from its dungeons, and with four distinct characters, each with a huge amount of skill, armour and weapon customization, a tonne of loot to find, thirteen missions (each playable in a variety of ways depending on your strategy) and the choice of standard survival mode or ‘Pure Strategy’ (which disables melee combat to focus on turrets and traps only), Dungeon Defenders is certainly no slouch in the value and longevity department. If you can jump online and team up with friends or strangers, then the game’s combat and defense system is a huge amount of fun with countless hours of enjoyment to offer, but sadly solo play isn’t quite as enjoyable.

As things progress and you dip into the later levels, maps become more difficult to manage and defend, while enemies become larger in strength and number. And it’s here where the game’s difficulty proves to be slightly unbalanced, managing to be far too unforgiving to solo players. Teaming up with friends locally or online is all but essential to finishing the last levels, and the only way to get the most fun out of the game. Ideally, you’ll want to have access to at least two distinct characters per level to make use of their unique abilities – the Huntress’ long-range arrow attacks and some of the Squire’s spiked barriers, for instance – to employ the best strategy and give yourself better odds of beating gruelling later stages. You can technically switch between classes at the end of every wave and try to multitask, but the effort and upkeep that goes into one player juggling and levelling up four characters isn’t ideal or much fun. Unfortunately, it’s a game weighted greatly towards the multiplayer angle, and while you can certainly play and complete it by yourself, it’s simply not nearly as enjoyable, and the punishing difficulty of later challenges leads to plenty of frustration.
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While the game employs some great visual interface ideas to make the game simple and fun without sacrificing much depth – like the handy pop-up stat menu for loot and weapons, which give a very clear ‘is this better or worse than your currently equipped stuff’ run-down – unfortunately the general interface for Dungeon Defenders isn’t exactly the most intuitive and enjoyable. You’re given a choice of a few slightly different camera angles to meet your needs on the battlefield, from a third-person view to a couple of more elevated perspectives, but none of them felt quite as comfortable to me as I’d have liked, and the game tends to automatically switch around between them at will, leaving you stuck clicking buttons to get back to your favoured viewpoint.

There’s a handy pop-up map that provides you with a full view of the current dungeon, along with the position of turrets, enemies, crystals and chests, but it’s a huge shame you aren’t given the option to set defenses on the map itself. The preparation phase can be a bothersome chore at times thanks to the sluggish pace of your character. Whether you’re in the building phase or attack phase, you navigate the map by walking around it with your character. You have to trundle across the entire map multiple times and walk to the location you’d like to position defenses before you can build them, and the snail’s pace of your avatar and the process itself gets a little tiresome – it’d be nice to have a quick-build option to speedily set up all your defenses via the top-down map.

The rather unwieldy presentation and cumbersome pace effects combat itself at times, too. The snail’s crawl of your character means that it gets a tad frustrating when the action heats up and you need to quickly be on the other side of the map to defend or repair something vital. You can upgrade your character’s speed in the stats when you level up, but the difference is mostly pretty negligible. It’s less of an issue if you’re playing with other people, where you can each take a corner or section of the map to defend, but playing alone becomes more frustrating and difficult than it should.
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The controls add to the problem, too; rather than select special attacks, healing and turret repair/construction options via face buttons or a simple, traditional menu, it’s all handled through a radial menu with the right analogue stick, which is an incredibly unwieldy set-up in practice. In the heat of battle, wading through radial menus is all very cumbersome and you’ll find it makes essential repairs and health boosts a needlessly complex action to perform quickly. The auto lock-on doesn’t help things, either, and often I found myself auto-locked on to a fleeing enemy in the distance while trying to slash another nearby enemy and finding my sword do nothing at all.

Dungeon Defenders is certainly an entertaining and addictive tower defense game, with a great blend of tower defense and RPG mechanics and a huge amount of variety. As a co-op experience, it’s a tonne of fun, but unfortunately it’s a game that isn’t well suited to solo play, where punishing difficulty a few nagging gameplay and presentation issues mar what could’ve been a stellar game.

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Dungeon Defenders is now available to buy on the PlayStation Network Store, Xbox Live Marketplace and PC.

Rayman Origins is the best platform game of the year, and the last great retail game of the year, too. It’s a feat that Ubisoft achieve not by reinventing the wheel in any way – the mechanics found in Origins are nothing you won’t have seen in any of the genre’s other hallmark titles – but by crafting one of the most lovingly designed old-fashioned platform games in memory, delivered with a wonderful wealth of imagination and some of the most beautiful 2D visuals the medium has ever seen.

Again, nothing’s particularly unique on paper: You and up to three friends take control of limb-deprived Rayman and his pals as you leap, kick, glide and slide your way through levels filled with weird monsters and dangerous pitfalls. Your goal is to hop across platforms and bounce on the heads of enemies in tried-and-true platformer fashion, freeing caged creatures called Electoons and collecting cheerful blob-like musical critters called Lums – the game’s substitute for coins. But while the mechanics seems familiar, their delivery is as perfectly elegant and delightfully fun as you could ever ask for.
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Rather than rush to show you everything it has to offer up front, Rayman Origins bestows you with added abilities at regular intervals throughout. It’s a perfectly paced game, and the measured rate at which you get access to funky new platforming skills gives you plenty of time to adjust to using them all in tandem and, more importantly, really helps keeps things fresh from start to finish. It certainly doesn’t hurt that the game’s mechanics, from the simple foundations of dashing, jumping and attacking, to wall-jumping, gliding and shrinking yourself all feel intuitive and fun to toy around with, while the layout and puzzles are clever, fast, fluid and tremendously exciting. Platform games live and die by how responsive and enjoyable the controls, mechanics and physics are, and thankfully those found in Rayman Origins are top notch and a joy to play with.

There’s also a huge amount of challenge to be found, but it’s forgiving enough that it won’t put off more casual gamers. Rather than frustrate you with cruel level design and needlessly demanding mechanics, instead Origins invites you to tie your own noose, tempting you with those pesky optional extras and collectibles. If you’re as OCD as I am when it comes to collecting every coin and collectible in a level, you’ll be constantly straying off the main path to grab extra trinkets or free hidden prisoners, opening the door to a much tougher challenge when you do. If you don’t feel like pursuing the side stuff, you can still play through the game and find it a substantial and hugely enjoyable, but if you relish a rewarding challenge, it’s there to be found. It provides not just added replay value but a nice balance of catering towards both hardcore platform fans and casual gamers, while a generous checkpoint system means recovering from a mistake is a refreshingly speedy process.
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You can also tackle the game with friends, too, with 4-player co-op. Sure, it usually just devolves into slapping each other’s characters senseless, but that’s always half the fun of playing with friends. While it’s a shame that the numerous unlockable, playable characters on offer only differ cosmetically rather than showcasing diverse, unique skills to put to use, the ability to revive dead pals is a handy one, especially if you’re playing with a less-than-experienced gamer. It also affords you a little more opportunity to combine your efforts to nab those hidden or out-of-reach collectibles (you can climb atop each others’ heads like a totem pole to access higher places).

There’s a tonne of variety in each level, whether you’re taking your time hopping along ledges and platforms, rocketing along rollercoater-paced water flumes, floating through the air propelled by a system of vents, flying through the level on a big mosquito sucking up enemies to fire them at other enemies, or struggling to maintain your pace and footing atop a giant, flying wooden worm. The same’s true of the game’s astonishingly lovely visual design, which looks like some amazing lost Terry Gilliam animated movie, and if Danny Elfman and Tim Burton embraced their inner child and created upbeat, colourful masterpieces of whimsy rather than macabre, gothic fantasy, it’d probably look and sound a lot like Rayman Origins.
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The game’s kooky and infectiously upbeat music, from the jaunty little tune that occurs when you hit musical Lum multipliers to the Mexican folk twangs that pick up as you dash through a hellish underground furnace trying not to get killed and cooked by fork-wielding monster chefs, will quickly stick in your head and have you smiling like a moron. The amount of goofy, whimsical character that’s injected into every level is entirely charming and helps make old platform level standbys – the jungle level, the polar level, a fiery lava-filled level, etc. – feel somehow fresh and unique. Everyone talks in pig latin and everything has a face and personality, from the arguing fork platforms that look like animated ’50s housewives from a John Waters movies or the smiling cheese blocks that you knock into lava, turning them into equally cheery broth clouds to hop on, to the gross, pudgy blob creatures that spew a geyser of barf for you to ride upward when you hop on their belly. And it’s all rendered in some of the most beautiful hand-drawn art you’ll find in any game as the interactive cartoon world of Rayman Origins leaves its fancy 3D counterparts looking positively garish by comparison.

It’s a minor tragedy that Rayman Origins got caught in the wake of a jam-packed season of major, stellar game releases, but as the one of last big retail releases of the year, Rayman Origins closes out 2011 with a bang. It recaptures the delightful gameplay essence of what made the platform genre explode into such a staple of the industry to begin with and filters it through understated, yet gorgeous visuals that most games this generation could only dream of. Hopefully it’ll be one that more people rediscover and adore once they’re all done with the Skyrims, Arkham Cities and Uncharteds of the world because in its own simple way, Rayman Origins is every bit as wonderful.

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Rayman Origins is available to buy now on PS3, Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii.
Click here to buy it from Amazon.co.uk.

After a year and a half of PSN exclusivity, Hello Games’ hit indie game Joe Danger: Special Edition hits XBLA, finally allowing Xbox 360 gamers to enjoy the amazingly fun and ridiculously addictive madcap stunt racer for themselves, along with a few added treats to make the wait especially worthwhile. Unsurprisingly, Joe Danger is still an amazing game. It’s simple and accessible in the best way possible, distilling everything you love about good old-fashioned platform, puzzle and high-score stunt combo games into one delightful and incredibly tough to put down package.

The game is a wonderful combination of Excitebike, Trials HD and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, with a little of Sonic and Mario’s platformer DNA thrown in for good measure. A side-scrolling stunt racing game, Joe Danger puts you in control of the titular stuntman as you play through a series of varied events collecting stars for completing various tasks. Some events have you racing against other opponents, but most are a combination of physics-based platform game and combo-driven stunt game.
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The incredibly intuitive and accessible controls and over-the-top, cartoony driving physics allow you to accelerate in either direction, tilt Joe to pull off endos, wheelies and mid-air spins, hold or tap the ‘X’ button to crouch, bunny hop or double jump and, using a Burnout-style boost system, you’ll have a meter of speed-boosting nitrous which refills as you perform risky stunts. The shoulder buttons also allow you to do different daring mid-air tricks depending on how many times you press them and in what order. It’s an incredibly simple system that allows anyone to jump in and play, and even if you can’t remember the trick combinations, a frenzied button-mashing will get the job done just as well.

If you’ve ever played the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games, then you’ll be all too familiar with the panicked rush of excitement you get from racking up a gargantuan combo, only to realise you still have to land it safely. You’ll almost always push yourself to try to add just a little bit more to your score before you set your wheels back on the ground and end up fumbling in the process, losing your combo score before gleefully attempting to do it all over again.
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Joe Danger recaptures that experience perfectly, and the controls, speed and combo mechanics are so simple and fun to get to grips with that you’ll find hours of enjoyment in just trying to top your own (or your friends’) high scores, while the instantaneous retry button makes it a speedy joy to jump straight back in. Like any great pick-up-and-play combo-driven game, it’s like video game crack, only, y’know, cheaper, healthier and without the risk of you being forced to perform sexual favours for seedy businessmen in a dank alley to pay for the cost of another try.

The levels themselves provide even more enjoyment for you to tackle, and challenge you to collect coins, hidden stars or just to reach the finish in a certain time while navigating shark tanks, spike traps, loop-the-loops and other obstables and hazards. You’ll duck under barriers, hop over hurdles, speed up ramps and over buses, and generally use all the tricks and tools at your disposal to collect all the pick-ups and make it to the finish without crashing. There’s Sonic-style spring bumpers dotted around, too, which propel you into the air towards collectible stars, giving you a tonne of air for pulling off tricks in the process.
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The game’s puzzle elements come into play in the placement of collectibles, and learning to use all the tricks and skills at your disposal in tandem becomes key. You might need to double-jump off a spring bumper to get a huge amount of air to snag a star, for example, or you might need to bunny hop off a ramp and then boost mid-air at just the right time to sail throw a set of spiked jaws unscathed. Like the best platformers, it usually boils down to timing and precision, and the control scheme is perfect enough to strike a great balance between a challenging game and an accessible one. Being able to instantly retry from moments before with a press of the ‘Back’ button only makes the trial and error of some levels that much more enjoyable.

Outside of the freewheeling high score fun and the levels’ core challenge, there’s plenty of other stuff to keep you occupied, too. Many levels have multiple routes thanks to lane-changing switching posts, and each event contains a selection of different star awards to snag. Whether it’s collecting all the coins, beating the time limit, going off the beaten path to find hidden stars or keeping a combo chain going from start to finish line, or sometimes combination of those tasks, like snagging all coins while comboing the level 100%, there’s plenty at hand to keep you occupied. You won’t always be able to do everything in one run-through of a level, so there’s plenty of incentive to jump back into each stage multiple times. You’ll need a certain amount of stars to buy access to certain events and levels to progress further through the game, and thankfully the act of going back and amassing more is a delight rather than a chore.

There’s also a ‘Sandbox’ mode, which allows you to create your own single player or split-screen levels. You’ll start out racing on a bare track and pushing ‘Y’ at any time pauses and brings up a tool box full of items, ramps, bumpers, hazards and collectibles for you to select and drop onto the track, building yourself a clever (or just completely crazy and entirely impossible) custom level to share with friends. It’s a simple and fun system to get to grips with, and while some aspects could benefit from a tutorial (it’s tough to figure out how to lay down a finish line at first), you can quickly throw together levels to share with ease, or sink time into it and try to create something on par with the levels that come with the game (though there is a limit to how many of each object you can lay down, sadly). You can also jump into the game with a friend with a little split-screen local multiplayer if you like.

New to the Special Edition is ‘The Lab’ which offers a surprisingly substantial selection of extra levels and challenges. Some are moderately tougher levels akin to those found in the core game, which place even more emphasis on juggling all your abilities with speed and precision, while others are a clever mix of standard levels and the sandbox editor tools. You’ll start out on a race track where some of the obstacles and ramps are out of place, and you’ll have to bring up the toolbox to arrange them correctly to snag coins and complete objectives, or you might have to add new objects to complete tasks, then rearrange and reuse them in different positions to score the secondary challenges. It’s all great fun, and adds even more content and challenge to an already excellent game. The Special Edition also sprinkles in even more extra objective stars across some levels, usually expecting you to nail every other objective all in one go, wherever that’s possible.

Unfortunately, thanks to Microsoft’s comparatively stricter policies, not everything made the jump from PSN to XBLA, as there’s sadly less options when it comes to sharing your custom-made levels. There’s no Little Big Planet-style server to check out and download popular levels, and unlike the PSN version, you can’t toss your creations onto a USB stick, upload them to your PC and share them on forums and such. Even so, you can still email them to people on your friends list, and when compared to what’s been added for the Special Edition, the few omissions are incredibly easy to overlook.

Far from being a bare bones port, Joe Danger: Special Edition is the definitive edition of an already stellar game. If you’re an Xbox 360 owner, then it’s a long overdue treat, but whichever console takes up residence in your home, you owe it to yourself to check out Joe Danger if you haven’t already. It’s a spectacularly fun game, and fiendishly addictive in a way that few games manage to be.

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Joe Danger: Special Edition is available to buy now on the Xbox Live Marketplace for 1200 Microsoft Points.

As you might know, Hello Games’ fantastic Joe Danger: Special Edition hit the Xbox Live Arcade this week. A wonderful and wacky blend of cartoony racing game, platformer and addictive high-score-topping stunt game, it’s an amazing title that you should definitely check out. Our review will be up very soon, but in the meantime, it being the season for giving and all, we have a few XBLA codes to give away to lucky readers!

To celebrate the festive season, the awesome folks at Hello Games have cooked up some Christmassy DLC for Joe Danger. Giving players access to a new Santa Danger suit (which causes it to snow when you wear it) and a four-wheel ATV for you to speed around in, the DLC adds not just a seasonal sprinkle of variety, but an extra layer of challenge and replayability to the gameplay. As Hello Games’ head honcho Sean Murray puts it, “I think of the Quadbike a bit like unlocking Luigi in Mario Galaxy. Suddenly the controls and handling are different, and every level has to be relearned and replayed. The ATV is faster for instance, but very bouncy.”

To make it even more enticing, the Santa DLC will be available to everyone for free on 21st December! It’s only available for a limited time and will disappear from the store after Christmas, though, so get it while you can! But we’ve got a great chance for you to snag it before anyone else and get the jump on your friends for that sneaky high score leaderboard advantage.

Thanks to the kind folks at Hello Games, we have a stack of codes to give away. First up, for the complete package grand prize, we have a copy of Joe Danger: Special Edition + the Santa DLC! And for those of you who’ve already picked up the game, we have two additional Santa DLC codes to give away.

To be in with a chance of winning, you can either drop us an email here and let us know which you’d rather win, or follow us on Twitter (@tempdistraction) and retweet either of our Joe Danger giveaway tweets.

Entries will be tossed in an imaginary Santa hat and the selected winners will get their codes Sunday afternoon, to give you a good few days head start on the DLC’s official release so you can play it before anyone else.

Best of luck!

Joe Danger: Special Edition is available on XBLA now, priced 1200 Microsoft Points.

I feel like I have to preface reviews of games like Scene It? Movie Night with the phrase “For what it is…” If you pick up a trivia quiz game expecting the same kind of experience you’ll get from a lengthy, narrative-driven action/adventure game, then you’re doing so with completely the wrong expectations and will be sorely disappointed. But for what it is – a fast, fun, family-friendly movie trivia game – Scene It? Movie Night is an impressively polished, dynamically presented and incredibly enjoyable experience that’s ideal for Christmas family get-togethers.

If you’ve never come across a Scene It? game in your travels, it’s a pop culture trivia game series that started life as an interactive DVD board game, with releases centered around Twilight, Harry Potter, The OC, and so on, before making the leap to current gen consoles with a handful of retail games. Now hitting PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade in downloadable form, Scene It? Movie Night offers up a movie trivia experience that won’t be unfamiliar to those who’ve checked out any other variation of the game. Up to four players rush to be the fastest to answer film quiz questions presented through seven varied rounds with each question offering a possible 1,000 points – the slower you are to answer, the more that number decreases. At the end of the game the points are tallied up and a winner declared, along with a fun little ‘end credits’ roll which highlights who got the most questions wrong, who got the most right in a row, slowest correct answer and so on.
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The question rounds are relatively diverse and incredibly fun and creative. The simpler ones play high quality movie clips from a wide range of movies, like Back to the Future, Forrest Gump, A Few Good Men, Beverly Hills Cop and Tropic Thunder, then have you answer questions about what happened in the scene, the movie and its cast. There are rounds which shows sections of a movie’s credits and have you guess the film based on minor characters and the actors who play them, while a similar stage slowly brings out a list of character names and has you guess the actor and some have you arranging movies in order of release or matching movies to actors or locations.

The more creative and enjoyable rounds have you guessing a movie based on an 8-bit pixel animation recreation of a scene, or a child’s drawing which represents a familiar film. Some use mind-boggling photoshop magic to digitally erase people from movie stills and have you guess the movie or vanished star based purely on the set and empty clothes. It’s a fun, varied selection that keeps things fresh in the limited wheelhouse of movie trivia, with the only dud being the ‘blurred out’ movie still round, which de-blurs itself far too slowly for you to ever score worthwhile points.
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The questions themselves are plentiful enough to avoid any repeats unless you’ve played it to death, and offer a great balance of just obscure enough trivia to provide a challenge (there are questions based on the career of ’80s ‘that guy’ Bronson Pinchot) but familiar enough that the whole family has a great shot at winning and won’t feel out of the loop. Covering a wide selection of major blockbuster movies, old classic and recent hits from The Godfather and When Harry Met Sally to Tropic Thunder and Twilight and a whole host of familiar films inbetween, there’s plenty for players of all ages to jump into. The game comes with the standard ‘Mega Movies’ blockbuster trivia pack as standard, but allows for additional DLC question packs to be slotted in, too, which will be released at a later date (a sci-fi movie pack is next on the schedule).

Unfortunately, Movie Night does lose a little of the content from the full retail console Scene It? games. There are no customisable avatars, which isn’t a major deal since the otherwise slick, well animated presentation and digital backdrops are an impressive step up. Sadly there’s no online support beyond a score leaderboard, so your multiplayer options are limited to playing locally if friends are around (or you can play solo if you like). The clunky animated presenter from Scene It? Bright Lights! Big Screen! is thankfully gone, replaced instead with a voice host, but like a 50 year old dad trying desperately to be cool to fit in with his kids, the supposedly hip, snappy comments he makes are just obnoxious and embarrassing.
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While it doesn’t deliver quite as rounded an experience as its full retail predecessors, the concessions that Scene It? Movie Night makes in the leap from DVD board game to disc-based console title to PSN/XBLA game are minimal. In many ways the new digital download format makes the Scene It? series a much more enticing one, packing the same addictive party entertainment of the series in a flashier, but less expensive package without sacrificing any of the fun. If you’re a fan of the Scene It? franchise, or just harbor a fondness for trivia quiz games in general, then Scene It? Movie Night is a great addition to your party game repertoire.

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Scene It? Movie Night is available to buy now on the US PlayStation Network priced $9.99 and on XBLA for 800 Microsoft Points.

Apples To Apples is one of the few real-world family games to escape being translated to the realm of video games, and not without good reason. A game that relies predominantly on knowing your opponents like the back of your hand, it’s not an experience well suited to hopping on Xbox Live with complete strangers. That’s an issue that rears it’s head with THQ’s XBLA version of Mattel’s popular card game, but as a local party game, it’s a cleverly designed and enjoyable alternative to playing with an actual deck.

For the uninitiated, Apples To Apples is a party card game in which one player is the judge and draws a green apple card with a “descriptor” adjective on it (like “delicious” or “terrifying”) and the other players each have a handful of red apple noun cards (like “country music” or “Lindsay Lohan”). The aim of the game is for players to whip out the noun card that they think the judge will best associate with their adjective. It’s not necessarily about the most correct adjective-noun combinations, but about knowing the judge well enough to know where their thought process will go – some judge friends might go for the most obvious answer, like picking “bear trap” for “dangerous”, but friends with twisted sense of humour might pair “delicious” with “newborn baby”, for example. If the judge picks the red apple card you played instead of the other players’, then you’ll win a point and someone else will take on the judge role until one of you reaches a certain number of points, winning the game.
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A single player mode isn’t exactly the chief draw in a party game, but developer ImaginEngine do a pretty great job at translating Apples To Apples into an impressive, albeit short-lived solo experience. With each round, you’re given a new cartoon apple judge, each one wearing a different costume. While in the real world card game, the aim of the game is to know the judge well enough that you can guess what kind of obvious, tenuous or bizarre links they’ll make between their card and the three green name cards, here you’ll base your guesses on the apple judge’s appearance and personality. The lion judge will usually go for animal related cards, the pirate will go for nautical nouns, and so on.

Rather than just select the correct card from a stack of three, you’ll spell it out on a Boggle-style letter board to add a little more interactivity to the mix. As the rounds progress, the game mixes things up by leaving words on the cards blank and having you guess and spell them based on their brief description. The later judge apples will be a little bit more complex; the clown apple likes double entendres, so with the ‘European’ descriptor card, he’ll chooser the pun answer ‘Paris Hilton’ over ‘The Leaning Tower of Pisa’ or ‘Italy’. The single player mode does a solid attempt at compensating for the fact that Apples To Apples isn’t designed to be played solo, and the visible personality of each judge is a clever touch. Unfortunately, it’s very easy and incredibly short, and you’ll speed through the entire single player mode in less than half an hour.
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Apples To Apples is a game that thrives on friendly banter and a lively party atmosphere, so naturally you’ll be wanting to jump into the local multiplayer mode if you want to get the best out of it. With a bunch of friends in the same room, it’s just as fun and silly a party game as the real world card game, with a few fun extras to expand on the ways you can mess with your opponents or increase your advantage. ‘Poison Apple’ cards are decoy noun cards which will deduct a point from the judge if picked. Golden Apple cards are special bonus cards which perform different actions depending on which you have – some steal points from other players, one forces a targeted player to miss the next round and another gives you a point for the round whether you guess the correct card or not. There’s also a nice selection of rule variations for you to tweak things to your liking.

The online multiplayer mode doesn’t fare half as well, and while it’s playable, Apples To Apples just doesn’t lend itself to an online game with anonymous, silent internet strangers. The whole key to the game is how well you know the judge and how well you can guess what kind of words they’ll choose, but all of that’s lost online with people you don’t know. Most people just go for the most fitting and obvioust answer, and how well you do is ultimately driven by what cards you’ll lucky enough to have in your deck rather than how well you can suss out the judge’s thought process. Another hugely fun part of the game is hearing friends talk everyone through the often twisted logic that goes into their judicial decisions as they choose their card, but that’s not something that translates well to XBLA either. There is microphone support, but online players never really seem to use them, so it’s just a silent, somewhat joyless process of going through the motions unless you happen to get people you know online with mics.
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The natural online problems are expected, but unfortunate, while a cleverly put together solo game is let down by its scant length and disappointing simplicity. But if you’re picking up Apples To Apples, it should be to play with a roomful of friends, and if that’s the case then ImaginEngine’s XBLA translation provides just the same fast-paced, silly enjoyment as the much-loved card game.

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Apples To Apples is available to buy now exclusively on Xbox Live Arcade for 800 Microsoft Points.