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.

Rating:

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

Created By Matt Groening
Starring Billy West, Katey Sagal, John DiMaggio, Tress MacNeille and Maurice LaMarche

When a beloved cult TV series gets cancelled before its time (which is pretty much a guarantee over at Fox TV/FX), fans tend to go through the usual stages of loss and grief:

1. Denial (“I don’t believe it. It’ll be back at midseason, I’m sure of it! It must be a mix-up – maybe they just meant to axe Jersey Shore instead?”)
2. Anger (“They cancelled Firefly!? It’s time to strap C4 to our chests and suicide bomb Fox Studios! Just make sure there’s enough of us left alive to pee on the ashes!”)
3. Bargaining (“Halve the budget! Or just do another, shorter season before you end it?! I’ll sell my left kidney to help fund new episodes! And if we bombard the studio with petitions and mail gherkins to NBC – because the lead character ate a gherkin in the background of an episode once – they’ll be sure to realise their mistake and bring it back!”)
4. Depression (“I just can’t see the point in waking up to a world that doesn’t have a second season of The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr…”)

The only stage fans never seem to reach is acceptance; people still cling to the hope that their favourite short-lived shows will be brought back from the dead and better than ever, never entertaining the notion that the returning product might not be as great as they remember, or that the writers might’ve lost the show’s mojo in their time away. I’m as guilty as anyone: I’d kill Jedward for another season of Veronica Mars or Terriers (Though I’d probably kill Jedward for a half-eaten mayonnaise sandwich, and I vomit at the sight of mayo). But while there are exceptions – like the 2011 revival of Beavis & Butt-head, which is smarter and funnier than it’s ever been – shows brought back from the dead don’t often recapture the giddy heights that made you adiore the series to begin with.
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After its untimely cancellation by Fox in 2002 at the heady peak of its quality, the renewal of Futurama by Comedy Central five years later seemed like proof that there certainly was some heavenly being watching over us and wanting us to bask in the glowing light of phenomenal TV entertainment. The subsequent series of lacklustre direct-to-DVD movies should’ve been enough to give any fan of the show pause, though. Futurama’s fifth season finally saw the show return to its 30 minute episodic roots last year, but the results are less than spectacular, and while there’s a few great episodes that come damn close to the show’s former greatness, as a whole it’s the series’ weakest season yet by a wide margin.

The show’s writers seem to have lost their previously impeccable skill for intelligent, timeless, rapid-fire comedy in the years since the show’s cancellation, and Futurama’s fifth season often relies on remarkably lazy gags. Pop culture references are hardly new for Futurama, but the writers used to side-step topical humour which would date the show, careful to frame 20th Century jokes through the eyes of fish-out-of-water Fry. In revived Futurama, characters born in the 30th Century throw out references to CSI Miami and The Boondocks, and already-dated and unfunny topical satire becomes the focus of episodes, with ‘Attack of the Killer App’ poking fun at iPhones, Twitter and featuring a giant, talking boil named Susan Boil.
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CSI gags were already worn transparently thin years ago and making fun of Susan Boyle is like hitting low hanging fruit where Futurama usually aspires to a much higher, smarter, wittier level of humour, and Killer App manages to be the worst episode the show has ever had. That general laziness is felt in later episodes, too. Christmas special ‘The Futurama Holiday Spectacular’ rehashes far too much of past episodes – Fry feels distant and disconnected at Christmas, only to have Robot Santa attack Planet Express, and a return to the planet of the deadly space bees, for instance – with a few clunky musical sequences, awkward pacing and without much of the fun of past ‘What If?’ anthology episodes.

Thankfully, it’s not all bad, and there are a few standout episodes that almost manage to rival the quality of Futurama in its prime. ‘Lethal Inspection’ manages to capture the heart and pathos of classic episodes like ‘Jurassic Bark’ and ‘Leela’s Homeworld’, Bender-centric body-swapping opus ‘The Prisoner of Benda’ nails the kooky, clever and hilarious sci-fi tone that fuels the show’s best episodes, and ‘The Late Philip J. Fry’ – in which Fry, Bender and The Professor test out a time machine that only goes forwards – combines an intelligent and hilarious story with character-driven emotional payoffs.
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Sady, season five is Futurama’s most wildly uneven yet, with some of the series’ worst episodes to date. Though there’s a trio of excellent adventures to balance it out, the rest manage to be just decent enough, with a laugh-out-loud moment or two per episode, and that’s a far cry from the usual ‘A’-grade-laugh-a-minute writing of the show’s heyday. Still, the couple of duds aside, it’s an entertaining enough selection of episodes, and worth it just for ‘Lethal Inspection’, ‘The Prisoner of Benda’ and ‘The Late Philip J. Fry’, which give fans a blight glimmer of hope that the series will hopefully find its footing again and recapture the hilarity that it once delivered effortlessly.
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Futurama: Season 5 is the series’ first to be released in high-def Blu-ray format, but if you’ve yet to buy a player, the DVD set is an incredibly attractive compromise, with a great visual transfer and a generous selection of special features.

• Audio Commentaries w/ Cast & Crew on all 13 Episodes
• Deleted Scenes (10 mins, 20 secs)
• Behind The Fungus: Makin’ a Hit Song – Billy West Hits the Studio to Record ‘Shut Up And Love Me’ (4 mins, 49 secs)
• Previously on Futurama: Unseen Intros from the Feature-Length Movies (1 min, 22 secs)
• The Adventures of Delivery-Boy Man: An Original Video Comic Book Scribbled and Performed by Philip J. Fry (w/ Optional Commentary)
• Bend it Like Bender: Bender’s First Best and Only Music Video (2 mins, 41 secs)
• The Prisoner of Benda Live Table Read (35 mins, 8 secs)

The ‘Prisoner of Benda’ table read, which offers up a live rehearsal for the episode, is a fun inclusion, but it’s strangely delivered as audio over storyboards. A proper behind-the-scenes recording of the actors doing their thing in the rehearsal room would’ve been better, but it’s a cool extra nonetheless. The deleted scenes and Fry’s goofy animated comic are entertaining, too, but the Bender’s best bits montage music video is a little pointless.

It’s the commentaries that’re the crown jewel of the set, though, as Matt Groening, David X. Cohen and a revolving door selection of the voice cast and crew jump in for a jovial chat about each episode. Like past Futurama tracks, or those from The Simpsons DVDs, Groening & Co. have a tonne to say and have a lot of fun doing it, which makes for pretty damn infectious fun and some incredibly enjoyable commentaries.

The Season:

The DVD:

Futurama: Season 5 is out on DVD and Blu-ray in the UK now.
Click here to order the DVD 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.

Rating:

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

In the arena blood and death are primetime entertainment. But not all battles are fought upon the sands…





To be in with a chance of winning, simply email us here and include the following:

1. Your full name and mailing address.
2. The answer to the following: Which actor plays Batiatus in the TV series Spartacus: Blood and Sand?

(UK entrants only. One entry per household. Competition ends 3rd February 2012.)

Following the huge success of fan favourites “An Evening With Kevin Smith” and “An Evening With Kevin Smith 2: Evening Harder”, the acclaimed filmmaker, writer, actor and raconteur responsible for such diverse movies as “Red State”, “Cop Out”, “Zack And Miri Make A Porno” and “Clerks II” releases his first new stand-up DVD in five years in the form of Too Fat For 40.

Filmed on the evening of Kevin Smith’s 40th birthday before a crowd of rabid fans at the Count Basie Theatre in his home town on Red Bank, New Jersey, this comedy special comes to DVD on 23rd January 2012 (coinciding with the release of “Red State” on DVD and Blu-ray) as a two-disc edition featuring the full, uncut and unexpurgated three-and-a-half-hour version of Smith’s performance and including a Bonus DVD loaded with extra features including additional encore Q&A footage and a look behind the scenes.





To be in with a chance of winning, simply email us here and include the following:

1. Your full name and mailing address.
2. The answer to the following: Kevin Smith had a small role in which Brit movie from Kidulthood director Noel Clarke?

(UK entrants only. One entry per household. Competition ends 3rd February 2012.)

Three charming but foolhardy crooks have the idea to use a fire engine as the perfect getaway vehicle for their new scheme. Featuring an all-star cast that includes Maggie Smith, Robert Morley, Dennis Price, Dave King, Derek Nimmo, Thora Hird and Will Hay, GO TO BLAZES is a lost gem of British Comedy.

The London Comedy Film Festival will be giving a special screening at the BFI on January 29th, the day before its first ever release on DVD.





To be in with a chance of winning, simply email us here and include your full name and mailing address. That’s it!

The three lucky winners will be selected at random from an imaginary hat and bag themselves a copy of the film on DVD.


(UK entrants only. One entry per household. Competition ends 3rd February 2012.)

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.

Rating:

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

Julie Cross’ debut novel ‘Tempest’ hit bookshelves worldwide this month. A fun, fast-paced action/romance for young adult readers, it’s a mixture of The Time Traveller’s Wife, Jumper and The Bourne Identity.

You can find my full review here, but the folks at MacMillan were kind enough to send along a clip from the audiobook version so you can check out a little of the book for yourself.

‘Tempest’ by Julie Cross is available to buy now in audiobook, hardback and ebook format.
Click here to order the book from Amazon.co.uk

Spartacus: Swords and Ashes, the tie-in novel to Stars’ epic swords and sandals TV series arrives on bookshelves in the UK on 27th January from Titan Books (Priced £6.99).

You can out find more about the book at Titan Books’ website here, and to celebrate the release, we’re pleased to host a guest blog from Swords and Ashes author J.M. Clements!

JUPITER’S COCK!

Author J.M. Clements on the language of Spartacus

The language was the first thing I noticed about Spartacus: Blood & Sand. While everyone else was trilling about the blood and the gore, the crotch-shots and the knockers, I heard the distinct sound of scriptwriters who loved language. Slaves from the provinces spat recognisable modern dialogue, effing and blinding, often with clear Antipodean accents. But when Batiatus first swans into view, John Hannah speaks in elaborate trimeters and tetrameters, full of classy poise and archaic charm.

Writers have long struggled with the problems of conveying the attitudes and ideas of a different time or place in the same language that readers use to write their shopping lists or shout at their kids. Tolkien invented an entire world in order to justify the authorship of a single sentence in a language that didn’t exist. Numerous science fiction authors have posited the use of an English that is decayed or mutated, each demanding new exercise on the part of the reader before they get a sense of the world they see. The same applies to historical fiction.

Derek Jarman found a way around it by having everyone speak Latin in his film Sebastiane. But even though his actors rose to the task, their argot sounds strange to modern ears. In the most memorable line, a man onscreen calls out “Oi! Oedipe!” The subtitles gleefully translate it as “Hey! Motherf*cker!” Roman insults and oaths didn’t draw on vernacular concepts – more often than not, they drew classical allusions, to Hercules and Venus, Vulcan and Jupiter. And their body parts.

In Spartacus, the writers embark upon an extended exercise in capturing the sense of how ancient Romans communicate. Dialogue is as carefully Latinate as possible, to the exclusion of much earthy Anglo-Saxon. No, not the f-word and the c-word, both found in abundance, but little touches like hello, goodbye and thank you, banished from hearing in order to up the sense of a different world. “Gratitude” is itself an anachronism, not found in Latin until long after the time of the Republic, but its use in Spartacus sets a tone throughout, and matched by much other dialogue.

When Craig Parker, as Glaber, says: “What promises have you made Batiatus and his faded bitch?” there is a music and a rhythm to his words. Even in English, the script conveys the sense of a language carefully conjugated almost into poetry, heavy with alliteration and assonance, even as it launches an insult.

That’s one of the reasons why I leapt at the chance to write the first Spartacus tie-in novel Swords & Ashes, because it was a chance to play with those ideas for a whole book. I took things the other way, as well, with chapter titles in real Latin, often with strong resonances with modern English: “Posteritas”, “Reconciliatum”, or “Argumenta”. I get a real kick out of words like miscellanea (a gladiator’s porridge) or spoliarium (the room where they dump the dead). I think it’s sweet that a gladiatorial groupie is called a ludia (literally “schoolie”) or that the gladiators used to call their pre-game warm-up routine numeri (“the numbers”). Such ideas can impart a real sense of time and place by their presence.

There are also some that need to be absent. When my first draft came back from approvals, it was missing three thousand words, most of them “the” and “a”. Latin doesn’t have definite or indefinite articles, and while the producers are happy to have them in the text, they are reluctant to hear them in dialogue. The pseudo-Latinate dialogue of the show is jarring when you first see it on the page, but you soon get used to it. It’s not long before you hear Batiatus bellowing in your ear about wine, women, and the arena. I was very surprised that I was able to last a whole 28 pages before his first outburst of “JUPITER’S COCK!”


J.M. Clements is the author of Spartacus: Swords & Ashes, available now in the US in paperback and on Kindle. It is released in the UK on 27th January.
Click here to order the book from Amazon.co.uk