Whenever I mention Kingdom Rush — say, via social networks — someone usually responds with some sort of reverence for the tower-defense game. People just seem to love it. Need more proof than a few remarks from my circle of online buddies? As I mentioned before, nearly 25,000 players gave it an average five-star rating on iTunes. Hey, I can relate. My personal addiction has led me to finish every stage and every challenge in Kingdom Rush — three times over.

Now the follow-up is out for iPhone and iPad (no word yet on PC/Flash or Android options). And while Kingdom Rush: Frontiers still has the same strategy-based gameplay where you plop down defensive buildings to stop waves of enemies, the new additions will consistently surprise you, level after level.

No doubt about it — this is an excellent sequel. But to properly explain why, I’m going to reverse our normal reviews format and start with the negative.

What you won’t like

That initial same-y feel

Wait … is Frontiers a sequel? Or a glorified expansion? The developers at Ironhide Game Studio don’t help their cause by offering the same base towers that the original Kingdom Rush has. The basic buildings haven’t changed: barracks (for enemy-blocking foot soldiers), archer towers (ranged attackers), mage towers (ranged magic), and dwarven bombards (explosive-lobbing cannons) — see our preview for more details.

A first glance shows a lot of the same old stuff, and that will probably lead to some early mutterings of disappointment from fans of the original.

Pricey premium heroes

As in the first Kingdom Rush, Frontiers features heroes — powerful individual characters that you can position around the stages to help bolster your forces. Three free ones come with the game. Unfortunately, the developers saved the best for your wallet. Sha’Tra, an alien who can summon UFOs, costs $4.99 — as much as the most expensive guys from the last game. Ashbite the dragon is huge and looks impressive flying around the battlefield, raining fire down on your foes. But you’re going to have to dish out $6.99 to see him in action.

Of course, these are all optional purchases. But to see the coolest units that Frontiers has to offer, you’re going to have to pay.

What you’ll like

Great new towers

Of course, the stars of any tower-defense game are those quick pop-up structures that you set up around the map to ward off invaders. Frontiers’ start off old-news. But once you upgrade them past a certain point, you’ll find the new options that will force you to make some interesting choices.

Do you go for the crossbow fort, which can increase the range of all towers around it? Or the tribal axe-throwers, which can plant magical totems that greatly weaken enemies and stop their spellcasting?

Do you go the route of the archmage tower, which can charge up explosive bolts or spin out deadly whirlwinds? Or the necromancer tower, which can revive fallen enemy units and turn them into allied undead?

Each of the new towers is uniquely powerful. They provide such vastly different strategies that I’d often pause the game to think through which upgrades I’d commit to on the limited real estate that each level offers.

And they all work together rather well, too. I can’t deny the small thrill that I get when my assassins decloak just in time to stop a squad of lizardmen near the epicenter of my firey-earthquake maker while my necromancer drops health-zapping pestilence over the area.

Little surprises to discover

In the last Kingdom Rush, you could find little secrets in each stage — a fish to catch, a mushroom from the popular Plants vs. Zombies game, or a small cameo from the Ice Age films. For Frontiers, the developers must’ve decided that they needed to show a little bit more nerd cred because it’s packed full of sci-fi movie references, none of which I really want to spoil for you here because they’re such a joy to discover.

A lot of them are interactive, too. Solve the puzzle for a certain fedora-clad adventurer, and he can help you squish certain alien threats before they hatch.

You might see a miniboss carve a new path through the jungle, creating a new, now-undefended lane for enemies to march down. You might bribe a couple of drunken pirates to shoot their ship’s cannons at a spot of your choosing. You might stop an evil tribal warrior from throwing a virgin into the volcano in order to stop him from receiving a god’s blessing, which greatly powers him up.

It didn’t take long until I was as excited to see what was in the background in each new stage as I was to play it. Even return visits to previously beaten levels (to complete extra challenges) would show some subtle changes. The game knows you’ve been there already, and the art reflects that with loving detail.

Conclusion

I have every reason to be tired of this series (beating the first game three times can do that to you). And for the first few levels, I was afraid I had reached that point where I wasn’t experiencing much new. But as new maps opened up, and as new tower-building options became available, I fell in love.

I will say, as one final negative (or maybe positive, if you’re the masochistic type): I think the toughest stages here may actually be more difficult than the toughest stages in the original if you can believe that. As of this writing, I still haven’t defeated one of the final bosses, who is a dirty rotten cheater.

But I’ll keep going back for more punishment because Kingdom Rush: Frontiers is just that damn good. It’s not only worthy of carrying the title of “sequel to Kingdom Rush,” it’s one of the finest tower-defense games you’ll find anywhere, regardless of platform.

Score: 94/100

Kingdom Rush: Frontiers is out June 6, 2013 for iOS. The developer provided GamesBeat with a prerelease version for the purpose of this review.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The Mayans were wrong. The year 2012 came and went without any apocalypse in sight. Yet we’re still fascinated by dystopian fiction, stories that reduce humankind to its base desires because of war, disease, or any other planet-wide catastrophe that writers can think of. Many developers have tried wrangling with this genre with varying degrees of success, but most take the easy way out by sticking to zombies and calling it a day.

Now we have The Last of Us, Naughty Dog’s newest third-person action game (out June 14 for the PlayStation 3). It depicts an Earth ravaged by potent fungi, one that spreads through either bites or in the air via deadly spores. The Cordyceps invade the limbic system, taking over the brain and transforming its host into ravenous killers and mutated beasts. Heroes Joel and Ellie must avoid them as they travel across the United States to reach a destination that may or may not exist.

The Last of Us is a radical departure from the developer’s previous franchise, the Indiana Jones-inspired Uncharted. But whereas Uncharted’s happy-go-lucky attitude would feel right at home in theaters alongside other summer blockbusters, The Last of Us feels like something you’d find at an independent film festival. While everything in it looks expensive — such as the detailed cutscenes or the lush expanse of the American countryside — the story is an intimate affair.

Joel and Ellie aren’t fighting to save the world. They’re fighting to save each other.

What you’ll like

The relationship between the characters

At first, the diametric pairing of Joel and Ellie plays like a weird buddy cop film. Joel still remembers what life was like before the Cordycep fungus began to spread, but in the 20 years since the outbreak hit, he has become an efficient killer — he accepts the brutality that is now a part of everyday life. Ellie, only 14-years-old, grew up in the Boston quarantine zone, and she has no idea what the world is like outside the zone’s high walls. In the beginning, unexpected circumstances force the two strangers to work together. But neither of them likes it: Ellie’s expletives makes that clear, while Joel’s irritated tone doesn’t try to hide that fact that he wants to get rid of her as soon as possible.

After enduring trial after trial of horrific events, however, they soon grow close. Actor Troy Baker brings Joel to life with a delicious Southern drawl filled with nuance and complexity. You can hear Baker slowly peeling away the layers (and years’ worth) of Joel’s pent-up bitterness and pride — which usually comes through in punchy verbal assaults when he’s angry — but he gradually sounds warm and inviting as the story goes on. Ellie (with a similarly stellar performance by Ashley Johnson) never lets go of her fierce rebelliousness, but she, too, starts to bring down the barriers she put up as she learns to trust Joel.

The paternal bond the two share is ripe for moments of much-needed levity. Ellie wanders around the levels and notices particular details of a time she never knew, like commenting on the absurdity of fashion models who intentionally don’t eat to keep their slim figure (“That’s stupid!”), or sharing her disbelief over the idea that small trucks used to drive around neighborhoods to sell ice cream to children (“You lived in a weird time!”). Joel humors her, acting as both postapocalyptic tour guide and protector as they trek across the country.

Though strong roles on their own, Joel’s and Ellie’s story wouldn’t be as effective without the large supporting cast. These men and women represent a broad spectrum of people you’d expect to see in such dire circumstances: the kind (and not-so-kind) strangers, the gangs, and even estranged family members. The collapse of modern civilization affected everyone in different ways, and the stories behind these characters give you a small snapshot of what that fragmented society looks like.

You rarely feel safe

One of the most terrifying moments of The Last of Us happens early on when you meet your first Clicker, a faceless creature with a loud, haunting rattle (it sounds like a mix between a dog’s yelp and the croaking ghost from The Grudge). While Clickers can’t see, they can hear supernaturally well, and if they feel like they spotted you, they’ll convulse with excitement as they shuffle to the spot where they last heard you – they’ll kill you with one bite if you’re not careful.

The Clicker is just one factor (and only one type of the infected) that contributes to the relentless tension. Human opponents, while not as scary as their infected counterparts, are a threat simply due to their numbers and their guns. Joel dies after just a few shots, so you can’t run in and shoot up the place like in other third-person shooters. Ammo is also scarce. You have to scrounge for raw materials in each level, like scissor blades and tape, to make new weapons. Oftentimes, the best tactic is to sneak behind the enemy and take them down silently.

Because of the do-it-yourself crafting system, Joel never felt too strong or overpowered. I had just enough supplies to make what I needed in almost any given situation … but the nerves start kicking in when you know your supplies are running out. At that point, your options are either to sneak from Point A to Point B without alerting anyone or to get rid of them one by one with just your bare hands (some instances require you to kill everyone in the room). Ellie does her best to help you out: If you engage in open combat, she’ll throw bricks or stab anyone who tries to grab you.

Each encounter serves as a stark reminder that you have to earn the right to survive. Sometimes, I’d start levels over because I accidentally used my guns, which alerted every enemy in the area. Joel is no ninja — he’s slow and heavy — but I was still able to deftly overcome the infected and humans with distractions (tossing empty bottles or bricks), traps (placing a bomb full of shrapnel near a door), or the good ol’ throat stab with my shiv. I wanted to feel like they were the ones invading my territory, and not the other way around.

The last third

After a knockout opening that had me tearing up within minutes, the first dozen hours of The Last of Us settles into a repetitive routine: exploration, combat scenario, exploration, and cutscene. It wasn’t boring by any means, but it starts to feel a little too predictable. A little too familiar. Maybe even a bit lethargic. I thought I had The Last of Us figured out — I successfully predicted an emotional turning point late in the tale, and when I watched it, I was sure that it was also the ending.

“Is that it?” I thought. “Is that really it?” As if on cue, the screen cut to black after the scene was over. The developer already had an answer … but it was an answer I wasn’t expecting. The gameplay undergoes a fundamental shift while retaining its core survival mechanics. The pace quickens. And the stakes rise exponentially.

Naughty Dog’s assassins will murder me in my sleep if I were to give you any hint of what happens here, so I’ll leave you with this: This portion convinced me that The Last of Us isn’t just a good game but a great one. A game that, in spite of some small flaws, you’ll be proud to have on your shelf.

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Animal Crossing: New Leaf is simultaneously timely and completely incongruous with today’s gaming market. The franchise is more than a decade old, but it feels like Nintendo slowly fashioned it in a furnace labeled “free-to-play gaming mechanics.” It isn’t free, of course, but it has all the hallmarks of that business model.

This makes no sense, and I adore it for that.

As with Mario, Pokémon, and Zelda, Animal Crossing is one of those Nintendo foundation franchises. New Leaf is the fourth go ’round for the series. This time, the familiar action takes place on the company’s 3DS portable system, and it comes out Sunday.

Despite the franchise’s age, Nintendo barely touched its gameplay and visuals. Sure, New Leaf has a few new mechanics, and the graphics are sharper, but this is just a refinement of a very old product.

But motion is relative, and while many would argue that Nintendo is getting left behind by standing still, Animal Crossing: New Leaf left me feeling that the exact opposite is true.

What you’ll like

One price for endless content

I know it’s not fair to compare a free-to-play game to a retail release, but it’s impossible to avoid in this case. The popular F2P business model is now a standard. Developers seem to love it, but — as gamers — I don’t think we’ve really decided whether it is good for us.

Animal Crossing is compelling evidence that it isn’t.

In Animal Crossing: New Leaf, you play as the one human resident in a town of anthropomorphic animals. Due to a misunderstanding, those citizens immediately appoint you as their new mayor. This gives you a few powers to control certain aspects of the village. Like the previous Animal Crossings, you will get a tiny house that you can slowly furnish and expand by purchasing items and paying off your loans. That means you’ll need a lot of money, called bells, which means you’ll need a net to catch bugs, a fishing rod to fish, and a shovel to plant fruit trees.

This is where Animal Crossing aligns with most of today’s free-to-play games. It isn’t skilled based. You are churning through mechanics that simply require your time. The fishing, for example, is just a roll of the dice. You throw your lure into the water in front of a shadow (which represents a fish), and you hope that you pull out something worth some major bells.

Harvesting fruit is similarly time-consuming. Each tree takes four days to produce its prize — and that’s in real time because Animal Crossing runs on the same clock as the real world. This means you’ll bounce between having nothing to do and too much to do.

However, unlike every free-to-play game, Animal Crossing escapes the underlying feeling that it is always trying to squeeze your pressure points in the hopes that you’ll pay an extra buck or two in microtransactions.

New Leaf costs $35. That’s it. Once you give Nintendo those 35 American dollars, every single piece of content inside New Leaf belongs to you. All you need to do is to put in the time with the game to unlock them.

After a parade of Facebook and mobile games with countdown timers that encourage players to pay 99 cents to unlock the next level faster, New Leaf feels so respectful.

It doesn’t want you to have to think about Nintendo’s business model — it just wants you to get lost in its amazing world.

A unique sense of place and wonder

I got to a point in my first couple nights with New Leaf where my character wasn’t wearing shoes. We were running through the town in the dead of a spring night. We were fishing and catching bugs. I had the 3D and the sound turned all the way up. I was transported.

If heaven is real, I hope it is exactly like Animal Crossing.

It’s a combination of the tranquil pace, the sound design, the friendly characters, and the welcoming look of the world that is so appealing. You have to spend a ton of time in the game, and it’s a joy to spend time in.

That’s not new. Nintendo always nailed the atmosphere of this series. The 3D is new, and the company puts it to excellent use. The visual depth adds a credibility to the world that I found deeply attractive.

I play all my 3DS games with the 3D on, but I get why a lot of people don’t. For this game, I can’t imagine playing it without that extra dimension.

Social and multiplayer

Animal Crossing is all about expressing yourself in a self-contained little world, but it is also about sharing those expressions with friends. In New Leaf, you can do that in one of two ways.

Players can visit each others’ towns using local wireless or over the Internet (as long as you exchange your 3DS friend codes). This adds a natural social mechanic where you’ll want to find out who has what kind of fruit, what kind of gear your friends’ stores have, and whether they want to trade some clothing designs.

Of course, it’s not always easy to get players together at the same time. Your town doesn’t live perpetually online, so it is only open to visitors when you set your gates open.

The good news is that Nintendo also included some more traditional social features, including Twitter and Tumblr support. Animal  Crossing players can take a picture in game at any point by holding down the L and R buttons simultaneously. You can then use the 3DS browser to share those photos to their social networks. We explain the whole process here.

It’s excellent for people who spend their time creating designs.

Custom flag. #AnimalCrossing twitter.com/JeffGrubb/stat…

— Jeff Grubb (@JeffGrubb) June 4, 2013

What you won’t like

The occasional overwhelming sense of sameness

As much as I enjoy my time in Animal Crossing, it’s hard to ignore that this is the same game I played on the GameCube. It’s also the same game I played on the Nintendo DS. It’s probably the same game many of you played on the Wii — I skipped that one.

I felt like I could get back into Animal Crossing again after not touching one since 2005. I was right, but even so, this is the same game. That might really dampen the experience for some people. If you exhausted this franchise with a previous release, then I doubt you’ll find much worth exploring this time around.

I don’t know what I would have had Nintendo change, but I feel like this is a franchise they could take a lot more risk with. That they try almost nothing new is really disappointing.

Clunky interface

What’s even more frustrating about Animal Crossing’s stagnation is that Nintendo doesn’t just keep the good stuff. The decrepit inventory management, conversation system, and interface design also all made the jump to the 3DS.

Every little action in this game take just a few too many button presses. Donating fossils to the museum requires you to first get the curator to identify them. If you have more than one, he doesn’t let you automatically contribute them. You have to advance to another menu where you can finally hand them over.

Menus to purchase items are all nested in conversations as well. So that means you’ll always have to run through the dialogue to make a purchase. If you’re holding the stylus, you can use it to select options, but it doesn’t give them to you in big boxes like the recent Pokémon titles. Instead, you have to click on tiny text prompts that are difficult to hit.

This outdated design exists throughout. I think the designers might believe it has some kind of charm, but if it does, it didn’t work on me.

Conclusion

Animal Crossing: New Leaf is a delightful way to spend a lazy afternoon. It does have stagnation issues — this is basically the same thing we played on GameCube, Nintendo DS, and Wii — but the magic is still real.

Still — it’s hard not to view this aged franchise with awe. It eschews all the monetization, player-engagement, user-acquisition crap that modern developers like Zynga are obsessed with, and instead it presents a complete experience for one price. That’s hard to reconcile with the constant push for additional revenue streams you get from nearly every other publisher.

That absence of DLC and microtransactions makes Animal Crossing a gameplay refuge. It stands apart from what gaming has become.

Many argue that free-to-play removes the barrier to entry and enables more people to experience amazing games. Yet Animal Crossing: New Leaf proves that maybe free-to-play builds up new barriers within the games that prevent us from truly embracing and loving the experience itself.

I hope Nintendo never stops making games like this.

Score: 88/100

Animal Crossing: New Leaf is due out June 9 on 3DS for $35. Nintendo provided GamesBeat with a digital copy for the purposes of this review.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Somebody found out that you liked Diablo. Blizzard’s demonic action role-playing game used to practically be the only game in town when it came to point-and-click monster hunting, but an influx of smaller games (and an eager fanbase who didn’t find the recent Diablo 3 satisfactory) have expanded the market with titles like Torchlight and Path of Exile directly challenging Blizzard’s monopoly on a subgenre that it created.

Enter The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing, the latest Diablo-esque action RPG out now on PC. With more choices than ever, should players care about another journey filled with gothic beasts and heaps of loot? Helsing tries to win you over with a combination of some new ideas and old-school sensibilities, but it’s not enough to truly propel it to the top of the pack.

What you’ll like

A slight change in setting

Most of Helsing’s contemporaries, including Diablo and Torchlight, set themselves in gothic-fantasy settings that begin to all blend together. While the first couple of hours of Helsing take place in and around a small town that feels far too familiar to Tristram, the famous town from the Diablo mythos, things really pick up once you make it to Borgovia (a fictional Eastern European city). It’s still plenty gothic but with a flavor inspired by 19th century England. Cobblestone streets and secret laboratories replace swamps and evil forests. It’s a welcome change in scenery.

Leveling up

Fans criticized Diablo 3 for a lack of options during leveling.  Instead of selecting specific skills through branching trees of abilities, you just unlocked new powers, and every possible one, as you played. Helsing takes a more old-school approach by allowing players to specialize their character through a multitude of choices.

Unlike most action role-playing games, you don’t pick a class for your character. Your avatar, Van Helsing, is capable of using swords, guns, and magic. You decide where to specialize through equipment and by upgrading your stats and skills. The same goes for your companion, Katarina, a ghostly girl who can attack foes, provide stat buffs, and travel to town to sell items (she works much like the pets in the Torchlight series). She levels up separately from Van Helsing, and you can also personally pick her stat increases and equipment. She can also learn a few skills of her own, most of which will add bonuses for your avatar, like added spell power or defense.

Even though the lack of classes may seem restrictive, you have a lot room for character customization. You can create a melee-dependent Van Helsing with a Katarina who picks off enemies from a distance, or you could focus on magical attacks while your companion takes on foes directly.

Rage

You can also power your spells and abilities by spending rage, a resource independent of your health and mana that increases as you fight. Using rage will modify your next attack based on bonuses you unlocked in the skill tree. While a normal shot of your gun will just do regular damage, a rage-infused attack can add extra power, hit multiple targets, and slow them all down.

Conserving and wisely using rage becomes an importantly strategic part of the action. You can quickly use it all to take down one over-powered monster, but you might be better off saving it to take down a large wave of smaller enemies.

Defending the lair

Occasionally you’ll have to defend your lair (your base of operations between missions) from an attack of monsters. While you do run around and engage them yourself, you can also place traps to slow or whittle them down. It all works a lot like a tower defense game, which may not sound all that unique on its own, but it’s interesting to see some of those elements successively used in an action role-playing game. In fact, I wish I had to defend my base more often than the two times I did throughout the entire campaign.

What you won’t like

An almost nonexistent story

Helsing has some clever writing, especially the banter between its main character and Katarina, but the story was practically non-existent. Van Helsing travels to Borgovia to help out a resistance who’s trying to stop a mad scientist from doing all his evil stuff, and this plot plays out with few surprises or complications. It serves only to send you to the next monster-infested area rather than to provide any compelling reason for Helsing to get involved (other than the fact that he’s a hunter, and this is just what he does).

You don’t even encounter the final villain until seconds before you start fighting him, with the story unceremoniously ending after his defeat. You just don’t have any sense of completing a journey, internally or otherwise.

Difficulty spikes

I encountered a few times when I could barely take a couple of steps without turning into a corpse, even though I just completed the previous area with ease. Even completing every possible sidequest doesn’t save your from random moments of increased difficulty, so you’ll either have to just power through them (you can spend gold to respawn back to exactly where you died) or grind for experience points in some level you already cleared.

Katarina is even more prone to prolonged lengths of inadequacy. When she dies (as much as a ghost can die), she becomes unable to attack or help for a few minutes. Especially towards the end of the game, it seemed like she spent more time inactive than otherwise. You can give her health potions that she’ll use on herself, but they do little to prolong her quick and sudden defeats.

Not different enough

Van Helsing does offer some new ideas to the popular sub-genre of Diablo clones, but it ultimately doesn’t do enough to really stand out. Defending your lair and the change in setting are welcome additions to all the pointing-and-clicking, but you can’t help but feel like you’ve done all this before if you’ve played any Diablo or the numerous games inspired by it. With the recent releases of Diablo 3, Torchlight 2, and Path of Exile, players have a lot options for a bunch of games that all play pretty similarly, and it’s hard for Van Helsing to not feel like another “me too” entry in what is becoming an overcrowded genre.

Conclusion

But that’s not to say that Van Helsing isn’t fun, and — although certainly a clone — it’s well made. You’ll find some great ideas here, and players who prefer Diablo 2 to its sequel will certainly love Helsing’s emphasis on character customization. But the story fails to elevate the familiar action to anything special. Mechanically, this is a great action RPG, but it lacks heart.

70/100

The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing is out now for PC. The publisher provided GamesBeat with a game code for the purposes of this review.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Memories define who we are. They shape our futures and influence our decisions. They can also be the source of tremendous pain. If we could wipe away the bad and keep only the good, who would we be?

That’s the kind of question the action-adventure game Remember Me (out tomorrow for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC) seeks to answer through the setting of Neo-Paris in the year 2084. The corporation Memorize has created a remarkable brain implant called Sensen, which enables people to share and store their memories in a network. In the first few minutes, players go from listening to people praise the technology to witnessing the devastation it has caused.

When the female protagonist Nilin wakes up in a cell, we watch as her captor strips away her memories in an agonizing process. He misses a few. That makes her dangerous. Nilin is a talented memory hunter who can steal or “remix” people’s memories through their Sensen, and as a member of the rebel group the Errorists, she’s a threat to Memorize. With her mind still intact, a mysterious contact named Edge guides her out of prison and onto the streets where she can lead a revolution.

What you’ll like

An immersive sci-fi world
Remember Me’s opening moments are a powerful way to start out the game. As a disoriented Nilin staggers around the confinement facility, the camera follows her every unsteady movement, creating a sense of dizziness. Everything is a little too bright, and she encounters horror after horror: white rooms that house delirious inmates, a machine that rips the memories out of people’s heads, and even a menacing “coercive” robot that hunts down escapees. She leaves in a coffin — one of many mass-produced containers for the dead and still alive.

The vividness of the environment persists. Neo-Paris is a gorgeous city, its infrastructure part historical and part new — the street level littered with androids, neon lights, and holo-televisions. From the skyscraper vistas to the grimy underground, Remember Me is an atmospheric wonder. It feels well thought-out down to the lingo, which the characters constantly bandy about. The game tops that off with weird, futuristic-sounding music that’s different from anything you’ve likely heard before.

The story drives much of the game and introduces you to eccentrically named characters such as Johnny Greenteeth, Headache Tommy, and Bad Request, among others. Nilin sets out to save the suffering city from Memorize. Only she can reach the people responsible and either enact revenge or “remix,” aka rewrite, their memories — altering their roles in events to better suit the Errorists’ agenda. Without her own complete memories, however, she’s unsure whether what she’s doing is right.

The uncertainty makes the experience that much more compelling and enjoyable.

A deep combat system
While Remember Me is big on story, developer Dontnod Entertainment carefully balanced it with strong combat mechanics. Basically, players assemble combos in the Combo Lab menu. You have only four increasingly long, predetermined combinations of the X and Y buttons to toy with the entire game — you unlock these slowly, one at a time — but the real depth emerges with the Pressens. Think of these as the individual Xs and Ys that you can assign to each entry in a combination.

Pressens come in different forms: Power, Regen, Cooldown, and the rarer Chain. While Power Pressens deal a lot of damage, Regen regains health for Nilin every time she uses one in a combo. Cooldowns reset your S-Pressens (special moves) faster, and Chains magnify the effects of the Pressen that came before it in a combo. Players can mix and match to engineer any devastating combo they please — maybe one string that inflicts maximum damage or another that helps recover more health. Some arrangements can even grant bonus Procedural Mastering Points (PMP), which unlock forgotten Pressens. Think of them as level-ups that offer you even more ways to kick butt.

The inputs are always the same — a series of Xs and Ys — but the results vary. Longer combos are more deadly, too, as later Pressens take on more power.

Remember Me constantly adds new layers to the combat, and it takes the entire 10-hour game to see them all. Nilin can use S-Pressens to more effectively terminate the enemies around her. For example, Sensen Fury is very similar to free-flow in Batman: Arkham City, in which players can rapidly trash a number of baddies without losing stride. And Sensen R.I.P. (Rust in Pieces) turns all robots into allies that eventually self-destruct.

On top of this, Nilin can shoot foes with the Spammer weapon she acquires. It has a number of applications, such as breaking shields or weak environmental structures with its Junk Bolt enhancement. She can also use it to interact with the environment by opening doors, moving objects from afar, and so forth.

Frequent new challenges
Remember Me flavors its gameplay with various activities. Some minor missions involve tapping into people’s memories and activating their “Remembranes” (ghosts of themselves in the environment) to watch scenes from their past. This helps you bypass security and learn vital information.

You can also locate and collect different items. SAT Patches and Focus Boosts increase health and Focus (which fuels your S-Pressens), respectively. Those are useful. And Scaramechs — little white “bugs” that crawl on walls and emit a ticking noise — are fun to search for and kill for PMP bonuses.

Sometimes bosses and minibosses, especially, act as the perfect break from regular combat, challenging you to think fast and use your S-Pressens and other abilities in creative ways. It’s fun to hear a lumbering death robot roar and then tell you “it’s just a flesh wound” when its arm falls off. This is a Zorn, and I love him.

These fights do end with a few quick-time events, but fortunately, the title allots you plenty of time to press buttons in sequence, and you quickly get a feel for when these moments will happen. They shouldn’t catch you off-guard.

For some encounters, though, a little surprise could do some good.

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Game developers usually stick to what they know. Infinity Ward makes shooters. Harmonix makes music games. And CCP Games focuses on massively multiplayer online games (MMO). But CCP loves its MMO so much that it’s venturing into an entirely different genre just to expand it.

Dust 514 (out now on PlayStation 3) is a free-to-play first-person shooter that ties into the universe of CCP’s infamous sci-fi MMO, Eve Online, to consoles — both games are on the developer’s “Tranquility” server, an ironic name when you consider how often Eve makes headlines for its massive battles and stories of betrayal. Dust players and Eve ship pilots can work together to take over planets in the name of ruthless factions and corporations, and what they accomplish will shape the direction of Dust, Eve, and whatever else CCP comes up with for years to come.

With Dust 514, the Reykjavík, Iceland-based developer is attempting to merge Eve’s personal and political turmoil with the accessibility of FPSes. And for the most part, the experiment works — player-owned corporations are already trying to outwit each other in devious ways. Unfortunately, the combat isn’t as exciting as the stories happening around it.

What you’ll like

Creating your perfect mercenary
Dust 514 has many more things in common with role-playing games than it does with shooters. While you don’t level up, you can tinker with your Fittings, which are outfits for battle that include dropsuits (uniforms you wear with different armor and shield stats), weapons, vehicles, and accessories (mobile spawn points, shield boosters, repair tools, etc.). Learning what each item is used for takes a while, but it’s a small trade-off for having complete control over the role that your soldier will play.

However, it’s going to take some money (known as ISK) and skill points (SP) to customize your merc: The skills you learn with SP determine the kind of items you can use in the Marketplace. You earn ISK and SP after every match. Actions in battle reward you with War Points (WP), and the more WP you earn, the more SP you’ll get afterward. Skill points also just passively accrue after creating your character, and this continues even when you’re offline.

That’s a lot of numbers to keep track of, but I enjoyed the RPG-like trappings. When I grew bored with the standard “assault” fitting, I groomed my mercenary for up-close combat with shotguns; when that was tiring, I morphed her into a tough medic who could defend herself rather well in a firefight. It won’t always be this flexible — eventually, I’ll have to commit to only a few fittings to reserve ISK and SP for more powerful equipment — but Dust 514 gives you enough time to figure this out before you go all in.

Fighting for a cause greater than yourself
The only way you can experience the type of high-level play that Dust 514 encourages is by joining or creating a corporation, which is similar in structure to online clans in other shooters. The difference is that these organizations can own planetary districts through the Planetary Conquest feature, where they fight each other for territory. They passively earn ISK from owning these districts and building facilities on them.

OSG Planetary Operations was kind enough to let a few reviewers and I join their corporate ranks to see how serious Dust 514 can get. It was a radical departure from just playing by myself — nothing illustrated this better than the Planetary Conquest battles. Headsets are mandatory in OSG’s system because a single ground commander oversees the battle, and he or she will pass down orders to squad leaders, who then pass orders to their squadmates. Each squad has a specific task, and the constant chatter between them intensifies as the battlefield changes.

Despite my basic equipment, I felt like I was part of a real tactical unit. Before joining them, I’d run around the maps aimlessly without paying attention to my comrades during random battles. But playing with OSG taught me how important it is to aggressively work with your allies to complete the mission objectives. Suddenly, the stakes for each match became higher (and inevitably more fun) because I didn’t want to disappoint them.

After a Planetary Conquest battle, each of the participating OSG members has a chance to evaluate her squad leaders and the commander: what they did right or wrong, and how they can improve for future matches. I’ve never been a part of such tight coordination before in a multiplayer game, so OSG’s intricate doctrines fascinated me. Every corporation will have its own rules and guidelines to follow, but the amount of intelligence and planning behind OSG’s preparations is impressive, and working with it made me a better Dust 514 player.

Political mind games
In my brief time with OSG, I learned how sinister Dust 514 can become. Given the crazy stories that spiral out of Eve Online, this isn’t all that surprising, but it made me understand why OSG and the others are so stringent in the first place. For instance, “shadow corporations” are a common occurrence, where players from top corporations create and become members of dummy corporations to attack districts in Planetary Conquest; they hope that defenders will lower their guard and send in weaker members when they see an unrecognizable name infringing on their territory.

I heard another story where a player somehow siphoned off a ton of the ISK his corporation was earning and ran away with it. I was also told that at least one corporation does extensive over-the-phone interviews with applicants as part of a background check before they can join. The reason? People can act as spies by masquerading as a new player when they apply for a rival corporation.

In one memorable Planetary Conquest battle — these matches follow a specific schedule depending on when the attack happened — the enemy simply didn’t show up. Some OSG members surmised that perhaps it was just a distraction because another PC battle was going on at the same time with the Gunfall, an OSG ally. The mercs in our battle were thus unable to help Gunfall because they joined the fake match.

The possibilities for corruption and stealing (and the drama that follows it) are almost endless. No other multiplayer shooter out there can generate this type of player-driven narrative like Dust 514 can, and sometimes it can happen without firing a single shot.

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If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best video game stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, EA announced that it is removing online pass requirements from games currently in stores, Tropes vs. Women creator Anita Sarkeesian overcomes Internet idiocy to get her YouTube show back online, and free-to-play darlings Candy Crush Saga and Puzzle & Dragons continue their revenue dominance on mobile platforms.

You’ll also find reviews for Fuse, Skyward Collapse, and CastleStorm, as well as previews for The Elder Scrolls Online, Rayman Legends, Wolfenstein: The New Order, and Infinite Crisis.

News

• The DeanBeat: Gaming’s biggest ‘suit’ gets ready for the craziness of the E3 trade show
• EA also stripping Online Pass requirements from its existing games
• Multiplayer online squad strategy? Quark Games introduces a new genre with Champs Battlegrounds
• BlueStacks’ GamePop Android console gets $50 worth of free games
• Sonic: Lost World features competitive multiplayer and parkour moves
• Ubisoft plans to show Watch Dogs, Splinter Cell, and more during its E3 presentation
• Blizzard delays unannounced MMO until 2016, resets whole project (exclusive)
• Anita Sarkeesian’s second ‘Tropes vs. Women’ video is back on YouTube
• Ubisoft bringing Rayman Legends to PlayStation Vita with bonus content
• Minecraft developer Mojang unleashing new game next week
• Some independent game stores may not carry used Xbox One games

Mobile news

• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic out now for iPad
• Candy Crush Saga and Puzzle & Dragons continue revenue dominance on mobile
• Crazy popular Dots iPhone game moves to the iPad with multiplayer mode
• Why social features are so important to mobile games

Tech

• Razer unveils ‘the world’s thinnest gaming notebook”
• The console alternatives: Everything you need to know about Ouya, GameStick, and Shield
• Researchers bring in graphics supercomputer for a breakthrough in the fight against HIV
• Forget the Xbox One and PS 4 — the most powerful gaming device is your PC

Bad news

• Uh, oh: Company claims its device can play pirated Nintendo 3DS games

PS4 vs Xbox One

• Sony CEO plays down ‘media hub’ and says PlayStation 4 is for gamers
• Who will win the game platform war?

All t his funding

• X-COM plus Game of Thrones equals Double Fine’s turn-based tactical Kickstarter game
• Clip raises $1.5M to fund Square-like mobile payments in Mexico

Interviews

• Former EA/Playfish exec joins board of red-hot mobile gaming startup Supercell (interview)
• Nazi robots in the ’60s: A conversation with Wolfenstein creative director Jens Matthies
• The Evil Within producer: The story is the puzzle (interview)
• Elder Scrolls Online’s game director on lore, combat, giant demon anchors, and dragons (interview)
• Infinite Crisis takes on League of Legends with DC characters (video interview)
• Splinter Cell: Blacklist’s Spies vs. Mercs multiplayer mode delivers exciting squad combat (video interview)
• Will Gran Turismo 6 take Sony to 80M racing games sold? (video interview)

Reviews

• Skyward Collapse truly reinvents the god game (review)
• CastleStorm offers fun, sheep-driven destruction and distracting strategy (review)
• Fuse stylishly hits the target but misses the bull’s-eye (review)

Previews

• Delays helped make Rayman Legends better — and brought some gender balance as well (preview)
• Ninja Theory’s Fightback: A touch-screen brawler that actually kicks ass (preview)
• Resident Evil creator returns to pure survival horror with The Evil Within (preview)
• Wolfenstein: The New Order moves the Nazi revenge fantasy into an alternate universe (hands-on preview)
• The Elder Scrolls Online is Elder Scrolls first, MMO second (preview)
• Infinite Crisis melds MOBA genre with familiar DC heroes (hands-on preview)

Pieces of flair

• Filling World of Warcraft’s boots: Why Blizzard had to delay Titan
• The Entertainment Software Association helped NYPD and Canadian Mounties stop game pirates in 2012
• Why curator Paola Antonelli added video games to the NYC Museum of Modern Art
• If Resident Evil’s Jill Valentine had a dating site profile
• Your lingering BioShock Infinite questions answered (more or less)
• What’s in the cube? The secret behind Peter Molyneux’s ‘Curiosity’ is digital godhood
• Do you deserve forgiveness in Metro: Last Light?

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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In Arcen Games’ Skyward Collapse (a turn-based strategy game for PC), I am The Creator, but I am not like any god that you may have played in a video game before.

I do not rain fire and brimstone; I do not flood the Earth for 40 days and nights; I am not a jealous super being concerned with the daily trivialities of human existence; I do not care what people think of me.

I have but one task as the wizard above the clouds: to balance the warring factions of the Norse and the Greeks. But I am not content to merely isolate these tribes from one another or from bandits or any other danger. Peace and comfort is not my goal. In fact, I take great pleasure in their conflict and their bloodshed. But I don’t want to see them exterminated.

You might say that I “work in mysterious ways.” Maybe I just have an odd sense of humor.

What You’ll Like

Skyward Collapse offers a unique twist on a stagnant genre
God games, traditionally, have been mostly concerned with direct intervention, such as meticulously shaping terrain to suit followers’ needs or using powers to initiate miracles to the advantage of believers over non-believers. Skyward Collapse has a handful of such actions, but they’re limited in scope and power, such as “smiting” a single land tile or repairing a human structure.

Most of my involvement is indirect; I can construct pig farms or rock quarries or iron mines that the Norse and the Greeks will use to extract raw resources. I can give them butchers or stone masons or smithies so that they may turn those resources into finished goods. And from there, they can choose what kinds of soldiers they will train and what weapons they will build to murder the people of the opposing side.

Those armies act of their own free will, and when the warriors of one faction manage to kill all of those on the other, they will not stop there. They will continue to plunder the opposition into ruins, which become permanent fixtures on the land that limit my ability to help the losing side.

I can drop in mythological creatures — like Centaurs, Valkyries, Giants, or Elves — to hopefully correct an imbalance on the playing field of life. But like their human counterparts, they too have free will and thus act accordingly. In other words, the Minotaur that saves the Greeks may initiate the demise of the Norse.

Compounding all of this are Woes. Sometimes, vanity will get the best the Greeks and the Norse, and their soldiers will wander endlessly and without direction as bandits plunder their homes. Other times, a great flood will cut off town centers from one another, or the floating landmass on which everything exists might suddenly begin falling away piece by piece. Like the free will of my subjects, not everything is within my control.

Even more stubborn than humans or creatures are lesser gods who will appear as the game progresses. These lower deities will not act at all unless bribed with resources that require a significant effort on my part for the human factions to accumulate. And after they do intervene, they can leave lasting and sometimes permanent effects on the world similar to the Woes.

But I do want to see the Greeks and the Norse kill one another because I have score goals to meet. Each of the three Ages (The Age of Man, The Age of Monsters, and The Age of Gods) requires that I reach a particular score by a certain number of turns. The only way to increase my score is to let these two human tribes duke it out.

And I can’t let one side completely eliminate the other — that would certainly end the only entertainment this lonely god has. So I intervene to give each side the resources to hold their own but never enough that one could finally end this eternal struggle. A truism about life lingers somewhere between the lines of code.

What You Won’t Like

The user interface is stingy with details
I need to keep track of many numbers in Skyward Collapse. Raw resources and finished goods accumulate in a panel on the left-hand side of the screen. For some of these, a particular faction can share them globally between all of its town centers. For others, only the specific town that produced them can use them.

This is all nicely explained in the tutorial brief, but keeping track of this shifting data as the game progresses isn’t always easy. My only option is to mouse over each individual resource one at a time, and even then, I only have access to simple gain, spent, and net sums.

Since I have to contend with humanity’s free will, the Norse and the Greeks will take resources to build their own armies, but I don’t have any easy way to see what they’ll take on a town-by-town basis before I end the turn. Sometimes I’ll study the resource panel just trying to figure out why I can’t get my lumber cache to increase despite building carpenters and woodcutters, for instance.

I’d really like to see the kind of detailed information breakdown that I’m accustomed to in a game like Civilization IV applied to Skyward Collapse. Where’s my lumber going? My steel? What are the Greeks building next? Shouldn’t I know this stuff as an omniscient god?

Conclusion

Skyward Collapse is about balance but not just in the sense of your ability to keep two sides from murdering one another. Skyward Collapse is also about finding equilibrium in the downward spiral of chaos in a world that you can only influence and not control. It brings real innovation to a genre that’s seen little significant deviation from 1989’s Populous.

Speaking of which, Populous creator Peter Molyneux is back in the ring with his upcoming Godus, a “reinvention” of that genre-defining game. Thanks to Arcen, he now has a tough act to follow.

Score: 90/100

Arcen Games’ Skyward Collapse released for PC on May 23.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Nobody ever asked Zen Studios to stop making games that star silver balls.

The developer of the successful Zen Pinball and Pinball FX titles, which are available on pretty much every device capable of playing video games, has decided to branch out anyway. Its latest game, CastleStorm, launches today on Xbox Live Arcade. The studio describes it as “a super genre mashup of 2D physics destruction mashed with tower-defense brawler,” but another way of putting it is that it’s like playing Angry Birds and a real-time strategy game simultaneously.

The plot involves a knight’s humorously epic quest to steal back an ancient crystal from an evil Viking plotting to rule the world, but really, the heart of this game is in building a castle and then using its standard-issue giant ballista to fling projectiles — like exploding apples and boulders that split into three boulders — to bring your opponent’s fortifications crashing down. (See? Angry Birds.) At the same time, you have ground units you can send out to try to weaken the enemy’s defenses.

So those are the basics, but the question remains: Should Zen just stick to pinball?

Absolutely not.

What you’ll like

The physics

Zen is famous for its physics engine; everything in its pinball tables rolls and bounces exactly the way it would in real life. And this system is a great fit for a game about knocking things down. It’s really satisfying to hurl an exploding projectile into your foe’s precious stronghold and watch the walls fly apart, especially when you set off a chain reaction that causes a huge section of the structure to buckle and crumble into rubble.

And it’s triple-awesome when some of that rubble falls down and crushes some of your opponent’s soldiers; in fact, you unlock an Achievement for killing an enemy this way. But that’s exactly what you’d expect to happen when giant chunks of stone and wood fall from the sky. Other games might make the debris insubstantial once it’s separated from the building, but Zen keeps the realism going all the way to the ground.

The same is true of flying enemies. In what is easily one of the greatest moments of my gaming career, I once used my ballista to shoot a dragon out of the sky. The massive lizard corpse fell to the ground, killing three of my opponent’s soldiers.

Thank you for making that moment possible, Zen Studios.

Building and destroying castles is endlessly fun

You typically have two ways to beat a level in CastleStorm. You can either destroy every room in your opponent’s castle or send your ground troops across the battlefield to knock down their gate and capture their flag. One of these is far more satisfying than the other, as I’ve said above.

But CastleStorm also includes an editor that you can use to design your ideal castle. You unlock new rooms by playing through the 12 levels of the campaign; in addition to barracks for your ground units and aeries for your flying beasts, you can also slot in special chambers that do things like make your troops do more damage or grant you bonuses to the gold you collect for taking out your opponent’s forces.

Your ballista will always be in the same place, but other than that, the design is up to you. Building a castle feels a lot like playing with building blocks — Zen’s designers are not afraid to proclaim their love of Lego — and it doesn’t take long to make something worth keeping. Once your masterpiece is complete, you can enter Test Mode to make sure that it will stand on its own and also to blast it into dust. You can pretend that this is to see how difficult it will be for your adversary to destroy the thing, but let’s be honest: Careless destruction is a stark inevitability with all building-block constructs.

The co-op multiplayer

Multiplayer is inevitable in a game like this, and Zen has made some interesting decisions with it. You have three modes to choose from, the most obvious of which is a head-to-head fight in which you and your opponent race to destroy each other’s castles or, less interestingly, capture one another’s flags. But CastleStorm also includes two cooperative game types that are actually more fun than their single-player counterparts.

Last Stand is a 2D brawler mode in which you and your partner each control one of the Hero characters. These are superpowerful melee fighters who are typically only available for a limited time in the campaign. You and your partner work together to fight off increasingly difficult waves of enemies to protect your flag in the middle of the arena. You lose if the bad guys carry your banner away or both Heroes are down at the same time (after “dying,” you have a brief cooldown period before respawning).

It’s a lot of fun standing back-to-back with your partner and picking off distant enemies with your ranged attacks before switching to your sword when they get too close, and this game type is way more manageable with a buddy, since single-handedly trying to hold off waves of foes that approach from both sides gets frustrating pretty quickly.

But the most interesting of the three is Survival, in which one member of your two-person team controls the castle’s ballista and sends out troops while the other controls a Hero character on the ground. Co-op Survival is a fun exercise in coordination and communication that gives both parties plenty of interesting and useful things to do.

You can play multiplayer both online and with someone sitting on the other end of your couch. I only played locally for this review, and the individual screens seemed like they would be way too small at first, but the ability to zoom in solved a lot of those issues.

The music

CastleStorm features a soundtrack from composer Christian M. Krogsvold (known on the Internet as Waterflame), whose work you might recognize from 2008′s Castle Crashers. The  music is immediately memorable and fits its “farcical medieval combat” vibe perfectly. In particular, an earlier piece that Krogsvold reworked for  CastleStorm will likely be stuck in your head long after you’ve stopped playing. I’ve been humming it this whole time.

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When Fuse works, it’s a blast. The combat explodes into clouds of fun as you destroy and enjoy with your straight-out-of-science-fiction instruments of virtual death. The co-op third-person shooter’s skirmishes have a seductive cadence that keeps you close to your controller. Each trigger squeeze can elicit a squeal of joy from your inner 13-year-old. Fuse has that power, and that’s an impressive weapon in its own right.

Electronic Arts’ multiplatform, multiplayer action offering, releasing today, does the most important thing right. And when you’re able to assemble your own A-team of friends-list recruited mercs, Fuse can deliver borderline-special moments.

But what happens between the reloads? That’s where it gets complicated.

What you’ll like

Crazy, combo-heavy combat
Fuse’s combat feels tight and well balanced. After all, the shooter-crazed minds at Insomniac Games developed the title, and the studio’s vast experience is evident in every bullet-pocked design decision.

This thinking led to Fuse’s inventive arsenal, which includes a soldier-incinerating Magshield, singularity-inducing Warp Rifle, crystal-forming Shattergun, and fire-chaining Arcshot. Combined with standard-issue weapons like assault rifles, shotguns, sniper rifles, and pistols, your munitions leave you with plenty of options. Firearms can work together just like the combatants themselves, allowing you to kill with cleverness. So if your friend encapsulates a bad guy in black melanite with her Shattergun, you can splinter the macabre chrysalis with your Daybreaker semi-automatic.

Building on this point, Fuse features a slick combo system that nets you level-boosting experience points for your squad members. Expertly executed shots, selfless acts of healing, and other team-centric actions result in valuable XP that you can spend on character upgrades.

The mechanic reminds me of other shoot-happy releases like Bulletstorm that reward creative aggression. And these point bonuses add an intriguing layer to the gunplay, encouraging you to throw a little swagger into your strategy.

Fragging with friends
Being a co-op shooter, you’ll get the most out of Fuse with a group of your most trusted digital veterans. Its A.I., while serviceable, tends to have trouble with advanced flanking techniques, and it can also take a while to revive you if you’re dying.

Playing with a friend or two (or three) will help you survive the campaign’s final missions. And human partners are an absolute requirement for the Echelon mode that sends wave after wave of increasingly difficult enemy swarms at your crew. Plus, the aforementioned weapon combinations really stand out when fighting alongside flesh-and-blood compatriots.

Switch things up in the middle of a firefight
Your team comprises of four different personalities, including the burly Dalton, stealthy Naya, practical Izzy, and dependable Jacob. Each character gets a special weapon (Magshield, Warp Rifle, Shattergun, and Arcshot, respectively). You may switch characters on the fly through the game’s Leap functionality. With a quick button press, you can jump from one team member to another, gaining new abilities in the process.

Leap let me instantly adjust my tactics during hostile encounters, and it also helped me understand the strengths and weaknesses of my unit in a fresh and unexpected manner.

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If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best video game stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, Microsoft unveiled the Xbox One, the company’s next-gen console and one-stop living room entertainment device, Ex-EA chief John Riccitiello urges console makers to consider consumer wants before shipping products, and Yahoo continues its acquisition madness by picking up the game company PlayScale.

You’ll also find a review of Resident Evil: Revelations as well as previews for Batman: Arkham Origins, Dying Light, and Civilization V’s Brave New World.

Xbox One

• The DeanBeat: Microsoft and Sony should escape binary thinking
• GamesBeat’s complete coverage for Microsoft’s Xbox One announcement
• Microsoft making $1B bet on Xbox One games, says bigwig Phil Harrison
• Xbox One vs. PlayStation 4: A battle for next-gen supremacy
• Microsoft shows behind-the-scenes design of its Xbox One game controller
• Xbox One: Microsoft’s boldest attempt to unify its services is a game console

News

• DmC: Devil May Cry developer working on beat-em-up for iOS and Android
• Craziest special edition ever? $190K Grid 2 bundle comes with … a car
• PSA: Xbox Live was not hacked today
• Super Stardust HD developer working on spiritual successor for PlayStation 4
• This is what a $150 Grand Theft Auto V: Collector’s Edition looks like
• Nintendo issues another patch for Wii U
• Skullgirls getting arcade port in Japan
• U.S. version of Animal Crossing: New Leaf has Twitter and Tumblr support
• Ex-EA chief John Riccitiello pushes console makers to get four things right in this generation
• Call in sick: Plants vs. Zombies Adventures is out now
• Nintendo promises to ‘discuss’ new Smash Bros., 3D Mario, and Mario Kart before E3
• Defiance developer cuts staff; MMO Rift unaffected
• EA appoints New York Times digital-product expert to its board
• Amazon taking Madden NFL 25: Annivesary Edition preorders — bundled with NFL Sunday Ticket

Mobile news

• Hooked Media turns in an entirely new take on app recommendation — one that Apple can’t kill
• Zynga unleashes Gauntlet-like Battlestone on iOS
• G.I. Joe: Battleground looks to capture the cartoon in a modern mobile game
• DeNA developing Dungeons & Dragons: Arena of War for mobile based on ‘D&D Next’
• Top Eleven developer trumpets the social soccer game’s impressive growth
• Jawfish launches real-time multiplayer game tournaments on mobile devices
• Happy Cloud announces $4.25M funding round and new chief executive
• WildTangent launches mobile games on Asus tablets
• DeNA to publish Peter Molyneux’s Godus mobile game

Acquisitions incorporated

• Marissa Mayer and Yahoo are on fire, acquiring gaming company PlayerScale

Tech news

• Who needs an Xbox One? Nvidia shows off new speedy graphics card
• Big Fish Games takes its cloud-gaming service to all four major screens
• HP launches a 20-inch all-in-one that doubles as a tabletop computer

Trailer hoedown

• Destiny looks like Star Wars, Halo, and World of Warcraft in its newest trailer

Previews

• Warner’s Dying Light will make you a zombie hunter by day, a terrified victim by night (preview)
• Batman: Arkham Origins hits the repeat button hard (preview)
• Civilization V’s Brave New World expansion feels like a culture club (hands-on preview)

Reviews

• Resident Evil: Revelations is classic, slightly buggy, fun (review)

Interviews

• Activision’s Eric Hirshberg bets that 40M Call of Duty fans will follow him to Xbox One (interview)
• Dying Light developer explains how to roam an open world full of hungry zombies (interview)
• How Activision plans to beat Disney with the marketing of Skylanders: Swap Force (interview)
• Batman: Arkham Origins’ senior producer on how — and when — to move the needle (interview)
• How Smooth McGroove quit his day job to record a capella versions of classic gaming tunes (interview)

Pieces of flair

• Beating down a fighting-game master with Divekick’s two-button gameplay
• Ceiling Kinect and Call of Duty dogs: The top Xbox One GIFs and memes (so far)
• GamesBeat’s Favorite Skyrim Mods #9: Dwemer Mechanical Mounts & Followers
• ROUNDTABLE’D! Game characters red-ring the Xbox One!
• The top 6 MMOs you should be playing this year
• EA’s ulterior motive behind killing the Online Pass
• Consoles that won’t die: The Sega Dreamcast

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Squishy fish zombies are actually pretty scary when you hear them in surround sound. Surprisingly, I didn’t even realize that they moaned until I started playing Resident Evil: Revelations on PC.

That’s right: The best RE game released in 2012 is now on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii U, and PC. If you didn’t get a chance to play Revelations on the Nintendo 3DS, it’s the story of Jill Valentine before she disappears in Resident Evil 5, complete with claustrophobic corridors and constant misdirection.

I adored Revelations on the Nintendo 3DS, and I’m pleased more people will be able to experience this story after suffering through less than stellar experiences with Resident Evil 6 and Operation Raccoon City. Revelations takes a step back into Resident Evil’s past by reintroducing slower gameplay and backtracking through labyrinthine “sea mansions” or, you know, cruise ships. It does stumble in the transition from handhelds to bigger screens, but the core experience is so refreshing that it’s easy to overlook messy textures for the sake of a Resident Evil game that’s fun to play.

What you’ll like

Gameplay hybridization

If you dislike the active inventory in Resident Evil 5 and 6, you’ll likely be surprised by how well a similar system works in Revelations without forcing you to pull up a floating menu in the heat of battle. Whenever you pick up ammo or healing items, they are automatically assigned to their respective weapons or quick-access button. You can only carry a certain amount of ammo at one time, but you never have to worry about managing finite blocks in an inventory page and ask yourself “Do I need bullets more than healing items?”

Really, the developers behind Revelations looked at the action-heavy direction in the mainline series and said “Why not slow it down?” To do this, they added something called the Genesis, a field tool Jill and associates use to scan for hidden clues and identify different forms of the T-virus. That’s just an elaborate backstory for a much-needed design feature: forcing players to examine their surroundings and not charge ahead as they would in Resident Evil 5 or 6.

Along with the Genesis, characters can carry up to three guns, so you can mix it up with a variety of short or long-range weapons. Whenever you want to trade out your arsenal, you can do so from various cache boxes littered through the levels. I missed the old inventory boxes from the original Resident Evil games, so it’s nice to see them coming back in a limited way.

Revelations also takes surprisingly well to controllers. I played the PC version with a wired Xbox 360 controller and needed to tinker with the keyboard layout (and I was still wasn’t satisfied with it). My greatest worry going into this port was how the semianalog mechanics would conform to a modern controller. The process was surprisingly fluid due in part to the 3DS version’s use of the Circle Pad Pro periphrial.

New costumes

Capcom loves mixing a little bit of humor into its horror games in form of unlockable costumes. In the original Onimusha, you could battle against legions of undead soldiers while wearing a giant panda suit. Nothing else about the experience changed while you did, except that you were very aware that you looked a complete fool in this otherwise serious world.

Resident Evil has a long history with adding extra (and often whimsical) costumes as completion rewards as well, and now Revelations has its own set of ridiculous alternative apparel. A bit of controversy rose up when Capcom revealed “sexy” pirate outfits for Revelations main protagonists Jill Valentine and Chris Redfield that you can unlock after finishing the game. Typically, I wouldn’t say this was a good and worthwhile addition, but I absolutely adore the ridiculous second outfit for Chris.

Rather than his gruff combat gear, Sailor Chris wears a short-sleeved (and a bit too small) naval shirt with white shorts, sunglasses, and burly anchor tattoos. The outfit is as revealing as Jill’s alternative pirate costume and is an amusing solution to giving characters skimpy costumes. Why does the girl always have to wear sexy clothes while men get even cooler combat gear? Finally, Jill isn’t suffering alone and people who would really like to see more of Chris Redfield get what they want.

Keith, a third character you briefly play, probably got the most revealing (and punishing) costume of them all. For most of his storyline, he’ll be running around snowy mountains without a shirt on. The scantily clad male video game character revolution is upon us.

Raid mode

If you’re looking for a more fast-paced experience in Revelations, the Raid feature (which is a holdover from the 3DS original) provides lots of multiplayer action. You rush through various environments from the main game, gunning down enemies for BP (battle points) that you can use to unlock new weapons and customization options.

You can play Raid offline or in matches with your friends. New stages unlock as you complete the game’s main campaign, so Raid is more like a postgame reward after you spend so much time conserving ammunition and running from monsters.

Console and PC players now have the option to play as a female version of the classic Hunk character (who first appeared in a secret playable scenario in Resident Evil 2) and as the deformed version of Revelations side character Rachel Foley. The Hunk costume is particularly ridiculous because she wears all the military garb normal Hunk does up top, but she simply isn’t wearing pants.

See, everyone is equally unprepared to fight zombies infected with a flesh-mutating virus.

Subtle horror

While many horror games tend to go overboard with their jump scares and graphic content, Revelations takes a much more subtle approach. Early on while playing as Jill, you have to track down the communications officer on the Queen Zenobia cruise ship. As you approach the promenade area where a note said he was hiding, you hear the haunting bellows of a strained voice calling “Mayday.” As you get closer, the voice is more distorted and it’s very clear that the comm officer is no longer human.

Long before you ever see the hulking, saw-blade-wielding monstrosity he’s become, you know that getting the key to the emergency communications room is a dangerous task. Even though you know you’re walking into a boss fight, the fear builds when you realize the only way to progress is to confront the horrors lurking in the darkness.

What you won’t like

Constant loading

A massive, Gothic dome called Promenade Hall acts as the gateway for various sections of the cruise ships you explore in Revelations. Leaving and entering the hall is something of an ordeal. Each new area branches off from the rest of the ship by two sets of ornate doors guarding an antichamber. Like elevators in Mass Effect, these doors act as a barrier so the game can finish loading a new segment of the map while you leave the last area.

These load times were extremely long on 3DS, and not much has changed in the PC version. The wait is slightly shorter, but it’s strange to think that more advanced hardware can’t readily load new areas of an arguably small environment.

Beyond the obvious door load times, you’ll also find yourself jostled from cutscene to in-game action through various black screens. The simple act of walking across a room can pop up a black loading screen then drop you into a prerendered conversation. These moments are never done elegantly, and only highlight the graphical disparity between video and gameplay.

Touchy camera angles

Revelations wouldn’t be a true Resident Evil game if it didn’t fall victim to the occasional camera problem. As you navigate narrow corridors and take on numerous baddies, you’ll likely find yourself attacked from behind or the side before you have any chance to see what hit you.

That’s because the camera hovers just above the players’ shoulder, making the viewing angle very tight. While maneuvering through close quarters, the character model will often fade into the foreground, but the camera remains as the same position.

If you move slowly and deliberately through the environment, the camera will behave, but for the times you’re running from overpowered enemies and in desperate need of healing items, you’re going to end up pinned in a corner or skewered by an enemy lurking just out of view.

Muddy textures

I did not go into Revelations with much hope that it would look gloriously high-def on PC, and it certainly isn’t. Anything in the world that isn’t Jill or Chris has an odd, muddy look to it.

This doesn’t detract from the story, but it is a bit disappointing that Capcom didn’t do much to mask the low-resolution look to the ground and water as you explore the game. Outdoor scenes look a little too carved into the environment, like you would expect from a handheld game trying to maximize character clarity with limited resources.

It would have been much more costly for Capcom to entirely remaster the assets in Revelations, but I really wish they had. The 3DS version is by far the most graphically stunning thing I’ve seen on handhelds, but that means it is still a mediocre experience on more capable machines.

Conclusion

It’s been so long since I could say, without any second guessing or qualifiers, that I like a Resident Evil game. I don’t just like Revelations — I adore it. Slower mechanics, scrounging for items, and marching headlong into the unknown are features not entirely lost in new RE games, but they’re rarely expressed as well as they were in pre-RE4 titles.

Revelations isn’t without problems, but it has an acceptable level of jankiness that’s true to the old RE experience. I expect cameras to dislike corners, and I accept that silly, door-based load times are going to run amok. It’s part of loving a decidedly B-class level of horror storytelling.

What I like most is that now more players than ever can play Revelations and realize that it is where the series needs to go. It has the right blend of action and suspense to carry its story and not frustrate us with unnecessary button prompts. The development team behind Revelations looked at what was happening with the mainline series and decided to turn away from it, and I am so incredibly happy that they did.

Score: 85/100

Resident Revelations started life as a 3DS game but moved to Xbox 360, PS3, Wii U, and PC May 20. Capcom provided a Steam PC code for this review. 

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best video game stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, Google held its annual I/O conference in San Francisco, revealing plans for cross-platform Google Play support, Electronic Arts decides to kill its online pass initiative that forced used game players to pay for multiplayer access, and GamesBeat gets an early look at Naughty Dogs’ upcoming project The Last of Us.

You’ll also find a review for Metro Last light and previews for Scribblenauts Unmasked and The Bureau: XCOM Declassified.

News

• The DeanBeat: Maxthon offers an alternative browser that won’t crash while running multiple games
• DICE L.A. is ’100% focused on Battlefield 4′
• Crytek’s Warface invades Japan under Nexon’s management
• Twisted Metal creator collaborating on new vehicular combat game Autoduel
• EA kills its controversial Online Pass program
• Microsoft phasing out Points system — Xbox market getting real-currency payments
• PlayStation 4 getting Gaijin Entertainment’s military MMO War Thunder
• Trion Worlds’ Rift MMO goes free-to-play in June
• Pokémon X and Y trailer reveals improved visuals and battle animation
• Ace Attorney 5 is coming to the U.S. — but only as a digital download
• Puzzle & Dragons is making $3.75M a day

Google I/O

• 10 Android apps that already use Google Play game services
• ‘Leveling up’ on Google Play Services means enhancing quality and utilizing social networks
• Google Play game services can shut down a pirated Android game
• Why Google Play game services works on iOS
• Google Play game services is a Xbox Live-like mobile network — and offers cross-platform gaming
• Google to launch ‘Google Play Games’ platform services for game developers

Nintendo Direct

• Nintendo brings E3 to the people … well, people who go to Best Buy
• Nintendo dates Platinum Games’ The Wonderful 101
• Nintendo releasing retail version of New Super Luigi U in August
• Mario & Sonic head to Sochi for the Olympics
• New Sonic game is exclusive to Nintendo hardware
• Nintendo of America started localizing Animal Crossing: New Leaf in 2010

Earnings and funding

• April 2013 NPD: Injustice tops software chart as console industry continues to shrink
• Hidden Path finds an angel to finance the final development of Defense Grid 2 (exclusive)
• Ubisoft sales up; plans 5 major games this year including something new
• ‘Video Games: The Movie’ is a feature-length documentary looking for $60K on Kickstarter
• With $1B on the line, Take-Two planning ‘innovative’ marketing for Grand Theft Auto V
• BioShock Infinite sells 3.7 million copies since March launch
• BioShock Infinite and more push Take-Two revenues up 48 percent in fiscal 2013
• Eternal Darkness successor crowdfunding campaign now on Kickstarter
• Cloud-gaming company Ubitus raises $15M to expand its streaming technology
• Japan’s Square Enix loses $134M for fiscal year

New content

• Call of Duty’s Uprising maps storm PlayStation 3 and PC
• Electronic Arts adding amusement parks to SimCity in $10 expansion

Tech

• Razer launching Atrox fighting-game arcade stick this month
• Plantronics blesses e-sports, becomes official sponsor of League of Legends tournament
• Nvidia prices Shield handheld gaming device at $349

Mobile news

• Frostbite Go: EA wants console-grade graphics on your mobile devices
• Tapjoy teams with Kakao Games to provide in-game advertising
• Spair launches testing for its mobile cloud-gaming service

Interviews

• The many paths of survival in The Last of Us (video interview)
• Warframe is the online co-op space ninja game you’ve been waiting for (interview)
• Why The Bureau: XCOM Declassified will be worth the wait (interview)
• Game Horizon’s Will Wright Q&A on the future of games (part two)
• Game Horizon’s Q&A with Will Wright on the future of games

Previews

• Sony reveals more tense moments in The Last of Us (preview)
• The dark, silly, and bizarre influences behind PS3′s Puppeteer (exclusive)
• Scribblenauts Unmasked contains the entire DC Universe (preview)
• The Bureau: XCOM Declassified tactical shooter game will play a lot like Mass Effect (hands-on preview)

Reviews

• Metro: Last Light refuses to let you go (review)

Strange happenings

• Ubisoft suspends development on 1666 game it acquired from THQ
• Gran Turismo 6 officially headed to PlayStation 3 (not PS4) this year

Pieces of flair

• Similarities between Injustice: Gods Among Us and the Justice League cartoon
• Mad Genius builds prototype similiar to Sony’s break-apart DualShock 3 controller idea (video)
• How Imagineers build engaging stories into Disney theme parks
• Warren Spector wants game designers to work on non-combat A.I.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

I was running out of time and ammo. Mutated wolves, freakish crustaceans, and a flying demon were relentlessly hunting me through the swampland. According to my watch, I only had 15 seconds left of breathable air in the gas mask. I had two choices: either let the wildlife eviscerate me from head to toe or suffocate to death from the surface’s radioactive atmosphere.

Welcome to the harsh world of Metro: Last Light.

Developer 4A Games returns to post-apocalyptic Moscow in this sequel to Metro 2033 (out May 14 for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC). The studio based its first-person shooter series on the Metro books written by author Dmitry Glukhovsky. Just a few months ago, the future of Metro: Last Light was uncertain when original publisher THQ closed down due to bankruptcy, but Deep Silver (publisher of the zombie-slaying Dead Island games) picked up the publishing rights for $5.8 million during the THQ auction a few weeks later.

The interruption doesn’t seem to have affected Metro: Last Light in any meaningful way. 4A Games crafted a rich, beautiful world fraught with danger, political conspiracies, and supernatural forces.

What You’ll Like

The unshakeable sense of dread

Twenty years after nuclear missiles scorched the planet (an event stemming from World War III), Moscow is a wasteland. All sorts of monstrosities have risen from the ashes and claimed the Russian city as their turf while other creatures chose to go underground where the remaining survivors try to live a normal life. Death looms at almost every corner.

This is clear when you first step foot on the surface. Between the pockets of intense radiation and the wildlife that slithers, swims, flies, or runs across the landscape, I was always nervous when Last Light took me back above ground. Part of that anxiety comes from a sort of tactile connection that develops during the non-shooting portions of gameplay: the act (and squeaking sound) of wiping your gas mask to remove any blood or goo obscuring your vision, repeatedly charging your electrical equipment by rapidly clicking the mouse, or flicking on your lighter in places where your flashlight just doesn’t work.

As the elite Ranger known as Artyom, you’re not some avatar in a virtual shooting gallery. You’re an active participant, a citizen of the Metro. A survivor. And once you feel like you’re actually a part of the fiction, the threats amplify tenfold. The hostility isn’t limited to the world of the living, either. Remnants of the dead — those who died from the blasts — appear in the form of ghostly apparitions and disembodied voices whispering to you in the darkness. Last Light isn’t a pure survival-horror game, but the creepy elements it uses are enough to make you paranoid.

The people

The tension can feel overwhelming at times, so a series of Metro stations that people have transformed into towns serve as much-needed breaks. They’re more than just trading posts, however. You feel as if real people have lived in these places for years. You learn this from the numerous conversations happening all around you. Some folks are refugees escaping the tyrannical rule of the Nazis or the Communists (at the end of the world, it seems divergent political ideologies are stronger than ever). Others are humble merchants who will gladly take your pristine pre-apocalypse bullets — Metro’s form of currency, which you can also use as ammo — in exchange for their wares. And some are just thieves, looking to scam the next poor bastard who walks their way.

Even your enemies, if unaware of your presence in the shadows, tell fascinating stories. One group I snuck up behind were sharing superstitious tales, like the story of The Tunnel Keeper, a mysterious Pied Piper of the Metro who commands its followers to travel into the dark tunnels. They’re never heard from again.

These conversations are shining beacons of life (or whatever’s left of it) in the otherwise bleak future that Last Light depicts. You can see the weariness on the survivors’ faces. But, somehow, they’ve found a way to go on with their lives after the bombs had dropped. I found this oddly comforting.

Post-apocalyptic beauty

Metro: Last Light looks stunning. If you have the means to, you should definitely play this on a PC. Even my ancient machine, which is slightly above the minimum requirements, was able to run one of the most visually striking games I’ve ever seen. The developers sculpted a gorgeous painting out of the charred and broken buildings, bridges, and streets of post-fallout Moscow. The same is true for the labyrinthine tunnels and city states of the Metro system where gas lamps illuminate the dank walls and filthy homes of its tenants in gritty detail.

It makes me jealous for those who are able to run Last Light at its “optimum” settings, which require, among other things, a $1,000 Nvidia graphics card. If you fall into that camp, pat yourself on the back. You’re in for one hell of a visual treat.

Filed under: Games

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If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best video game stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, Activision reveals strong first quarter earnings while Blizzard loses 1.3 million World of Warcraft subscribers, EA lays off 1,000 but expects to develop Disney’s Star Wars games, indie charity drive Hunble Bundle now accepts the virtual currency Bitcoin, and the Amazon Appstore beats Google to distributing paid apps in China.

We’ve also got a lot of previews for you, including Splinter Cell: Blacklist, Deadpool, and Watch Dogs, and reviews of Star Trek and Mario and Donkey Kong: Minis on the Move.

News

• The DeanBeat: Why Nintendo should have bought Ouya and other might-have-beens
• Brenda Romero’s Train board game will make you ponder the Holocaust
• Warner Bros. gets a new digital games chief
• Battlefield 3 servers under DDoS attack; DICE ‘working around the clock’
• Sony insists the PlayStation 4 won’t kill its bottom line as the PS3 did
• Death by dubstep: Saints Row IV demo reveals gameplay and weapons
• Assassin’s Creed mastermind Patrice Désilets claims Ubisoft fired him
• After 1,000 layoffs, EA could find itself short-handed for Star Wars games (analysis)
• Xseed Games unites with Marvelous U.S.A. for bigger mobile and online presence
• Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon director already considering the sequel

Mobile news

• Mobile game Airport Scanner helping TSA officers screen luggage more accurately
• BlueStacks steps into gaming with Gamepop — a Netflix for mobile games
• Beware the Angry Bulls: Zynga launches Running With Friends
• Amazon Appstore invades China, beats Google itself to paid apps
• PlayScape partners with Amazon for custom content on the Appstore

Tech

• With $3.2M in funding, Dekko unveils a clever tech to insert animations into the real world
• Sony to begin making PlayStation 3 in Brazil
• Sims creator Will Wright: Next consoles can become ‘connective tissue’ between games & entertainment
• Ouya spills its guts for repair firm iFixit

Strange happenings

• Download version of Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D requires at least a 4GB SD card
• Humble Bundle now accepts the Bitcoin digital currency
• World of Warcraft loses 1.3 million subscribers
• Diablo III patch glitch results in gold duping that breaks auction house (UPDATED)
• Dota 2 replaces World of Warcraft as Raptr’s third most-played game
• SimCity moves 1.6 million copies despite troubled launch
• Star Wars: Battlefront III footage leaks online

Fighting words

• Developer Warren Spector slams Wolfenstein: The New Order

Fund it

• Crowdfunding for Eternal Darkness successor off to sluggish start
• Cryptozoic launches Kickstarter for Hex: Shards of Fate online trading card game

Earnings

• Not all game companies are hurting: Nexon posts strong Q1 results
• PlayStation a nonfactor in Sony’s first profit in 5 years
• Activision Blizzard says Call of Duty: Ghosts will be a huge launch, but stock falls on weak Warcraft numbers
• Activision blows away first quarter earnings targets, raises estimates for year
• EA misses slightly on revised earnings but hits its revenue targets

Safeguarding the future

• Activision ups marketing over fears of Battlefield 4, Disney Infinity, and Dota 2
• Sony teases something new for Gran Turismo; reveal coming May 15
• EA scores a licensing agreement to lock up FIFA brand until 2022
• EA has 11 big titles, 15 mobile games coming in the next year (but no Star Wars)

Previews

• Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs highlights the down side of smart cities (preview)
• Watch Dogs creates an open-world morality (preview)
• Katanas, daggers, and guns are no match for Deadpool’s mouth (preview)
• Splinter Cell: Blacklist’s co-op mission feels more like a solo op (Preview)
• Splinter Cell: Blacklist sneaks in new and classic Spies vs. Mercs modes (Preview)

Reviews

• Mario and Donkey Kong: Minis on the Move is a puzzler with delightful variety (review)
• The crew of the Enterprise finds an unremarkable shooter in Star Trek (review)

Interviews

• Watch Dog creators bring the reality of “smart cities” to games (interview)

Pieces of flair

• How 3D scanning helped create the face of Bioshock Infinite’s Elizabeth
• Valve’s experimental psychologist discusses sweat detection and eye-tracking for games
• Return of the Tweetbook Q&A: BioShock vs. BioShock Infinite

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Every time Nintendo hosts a question-and-answer session for its investors, someone always ask when renowned developer will release games for iOS and Android devices. Nintendo president Satoru Iwata always kindly informs them that they have no plans to do anything like that.

The thing is, Nintendo is already developing ideal mobile games. Titles like Crashmo that follow the structure of Angry Birds but that have a level of polish unseen on an Apple device.

That’s the story with Mario and Donkey Kong: Minis on the Move. This Nintendo 3DS puzzle game, due out today for $9.99 for the system’s eShop download service, packages a variety of puzzle mechanics into bite-sized levels that would easily stand out in the crowded mobile-app market.

But Mario and Donkey Kong is on Nintendo’s 3D handheld, and it costs quite a bit more than the average mobile app. Is Minis on the Move still worth a gamer’s time and money on that platform?

Without a doubt.

What you’ll like

Variety of puzzle mechanics

Mario and Donkey Kong: Minis on the Move throws a plethora of ideas at its players. The basic concept is to ensure autonomous toy versions of Mario, Donkey Kong, Princess Peach, Toad, and others make their way to the end of the stage. Players only have the ability speed up these wind-up versions of the beloved Nintendo roster but that’s it.

Instead, gamers manipulate parts of the stage. All of the action happens on the touchscreen with a grid that shows the makeup of the level. Early on, you’ll race against the clock trying to place certain blocks on that grid to help guide Mario to the end. By the end, you’ll have experienced a dozen different takes on this basic concept.

It’s a smart developer that changes up mechanics every 15 minutes or so, and Nintendo definitely prescribed to that school of thought for Minis on the Move.

By the time you get tired of placing block on the grid, Minis on the Move confronts you with blocks that you have to turn. On the Princess Peach-themed stages, it drops the timer and gives you the chance to place a finite number of pieces into the stage like a puzzle. If you can determine the right placement for everything, you win the stage. In the Toad games, you’ll eventually start dragging pieces around the play area in real-time in a hectic mode that will scratch a different itch than the slower-paced modes.

It shifts gears so often that you’ll never fall into routine, and that sets it above most other puzzle games on the market right now.

What you won’t like

Top screen is pretty but doesn’t have any bearing on gameplay

Minis on the Move has some gorgeous 3D effects on the 3DS’s top screen. Things float above the levels and medallions pop out of the system when you earn them, but this isn’t what you’re interacting with.

Instead, everything happens on the 2D, simplified map-version of Minis on the Move on the bottom screen.

The 3D screen is almost unnecessary. Sure, the visuals are cute and colorful, but they also are a reminder that Nintendo wasted a lot of the system’s visual potential.

Slow tutorial stands between you and the action

Nintendo is so afraid to introduce multiple concepts at once. In Minis on the Move, this means you’ll learn new ideas and mechanics one level at a time for the first 20 minutes. It’s excruciating since most will figure out what is happening just by looking at the level.

It’s not enough to damage the overall game, but it is an obstacle gamers will have to overcome before they will enjoy the game.

Conclusion

Mario and Donkey Kong: Minis on the Move is another solid entry for the 3DS. It’s not the system’s best puzzle game — that’s still probably Crashmo — but it is its most varied.

As with Crashmo, I’d rather spend my time with a game as well considered as Mario and Donkey Kong than with just about any title designed for smartphones. Nintendo’s respect for the player’s time, outside of the slow tutorial, is something rare in all of video games, let alone free and 99-cent iOS releases.

The smart mechanics and often-changing gameplay will keep you entertained long past the point of getting your $10 worth.

Score: 85/100

Mario and Donkey Kong: Minis on the Move is 3DS exclusive released May 9, 2013. Nintendo provided an eShop code for the purposes of this review.

Captain’s log. Stardate 5514. The U.S.S. Enterprise has come upon a strange relic from Earth’s past: Some archaic form of digital entertainment entitled “Star Trek.” According to our computer’s database, this was a “video game” of the third-person shooter genre, released back in April 23, 2013 for personal computers and two strange devices called the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

To better understand our history, I have assigned my crew to run a series of experiments on this … thing. What follows are the reports from my officers as they plodded through, struggled with, and eventually conquered this challenge. We have come one step closer to understanding our human ancestors.

And their questionable tastes.

What You’ll Like

It’s Star Trek

Lt. Hikaru Sulu’s log:

Captain, it’s almost hard to believe, but we appear as the characters of this simulation. Well, almost. We’re all here by name, but we look different. Younger, shinier, and sexier! It’s like someone made a play about our lives, but all the roles were recast.

But I have to admit, captain, this digital adventure did intrigue me. The plot reminded me of our own missions, just with a lot more shooting and explosions. Perhaps it wasn’t as exciting as some of our more prolific expeditions, but this was a tale of similar sensibilities.

Co-op

Ensign Pavel Chekov’s log:

The captain assigned me to experiment the cooperative action with Lt. Sulu. I controlled the awatar that resembled Commander Spock while Sulu directed the Captain Kirk character.

I feel running the experiment with Sulu was far more productive than it would have indiwidually. Much like the great, Russain-invented game of hockey, it was possible for us to do well enough on our own, but we succeeded much more easily when working together. Many cooperative scenarios forced us to engage in countless mundane tasks like opening doors together. However, other situations were much more adwenturous, like a segment where we used transporter guns to beam each other around warious obstacles.

Also, while the simulation presented us with countless “hacking” scenarios that were as fulfilling as watered-down wodka, a cooperative wariant on hacking was much more interesting, forcing both of us to match computer wave lengths by redirecting the left directional input dewice.

Music and voice acting

Communication officer Nyota Uhura’s log:

Captain, it’s … music! Beautiful, exciting music! It sounds like a style of accompaniment usually used for theatrical movies from Earth’s 20th and 21st centuries. Also, while the voices projecting out of these characters sound nothing like our own, I do find them to seem strangely authentic. Sometimes the dialogue can even be quite charming, especially between the Spock and Kirk characters. I must admit that I giggled when the Spock avatar sat in the captain’s chair, prompting Kirk to quip, “Don’t get too comfortable.”

What You Won’t Like

It’s not pretty

Chief medical officer Dr. Leonard McCoy’s log:

Jim, I’ve seen some ugly sights in my day. Hell, I once accidentally walked in on Spock using the public sonic shower. But this …”game”? Damn it, Jim! It’s about as disgusting as a Tellarite honeymoon.

I think whoever made this thing wanted these characters to represent humanoid lifeforms, but they’re all discombobulated! Faces looks squished together, mouths awkwardly open and close like a nutcracker, and they just don’t act natural! Hell, once my avatar slid halfway across the floor on his knees when I was trying to get him to go down a ladder.

These projections just disobey the law the physics. Often their body parts just pass through anything around them. Walls, weapons, other people — anything! I can’t make heads or tails of it.

But even without these technical blemishes, this girl isn’t going to win any beauty pageants any time soon. Every environment looks the same, either the clean, white corridors of the Federation areas or the brown, rocky locales of the Gorn. Damn it, I wasn’t expecting to see all the colors of Risa, but a little variation in pigment would have gone a long way.

It’s unoriginal

Science officer Spock’s log:

Captain, in order to better understand this specimen, I have examined over 200 other examples of “shooting video games.” It appears that Star Trek offers no new ideas, instead opting to replicate mechanics and experiences from other simulations, often with a lack of finesse usually seen in its contemporaries. Most of the “entertainment” involves ducking behind cover and shooting aliens, a task that quickly becomes mundane.

And while Ensign Chekov remarked that he enjoyed his cooperative experiments with Lt. Sulu, I opted to perform my examinations singularly. I can tell you, Captain, that I found neither enjoyment or amusement.

Conclusion

Captain’s log. After carefully reviewing the reports of my crew, it seems that Star Trek is an unoriginal example of an archaic form of entertainment. It appears that only those with bizarre, intense fantasies of being Mr. Spock or myself would get any enjoyment out of the experience, and even then only if they have a partner to share the experiment with.

Mr. Spock has informed me that it was customary to conclude analysis on simulations of this sort with a numerical score. It seems like an inefficient way to remark on the quality of entertainment, but we will follow suit in the spirit of tradition.

59/100

Star Trek is out now for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC. The publisher provided GamesBeat with two copies of the 360 version game for the purposes of this review.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best video game stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, Microsoft announced that it will unveil the new Xbox console on May 21, Nordic Games Licensing acquires both Darksiders and Red Faction from the THQ bankruptcy auction, and Candy Crush developer King overtakes Zynga as the largest social gaming company.

You’ll also find reviews of Monaco, Dead Island: Riptide, Injustice: Gods Among Us, and Defiance, as well as previews for Call of Juarez: Gunslinger and Kingdom Rush: Frontiers.

News

• The DeanBeat: King overtakes Zynga as the largest social gaming company
• Don’t call it the shooter: 2K Marin re-unveils its XCOM game
• EA confirms additional layoffs as it continues its post-Riccitiello transition
• Bethesda summons Legendary Edition of Skyrim to retailers on June 7
• Zynga to shut four more weak games, including The Ville
• Xbox alumni set up fund for student game developers at USC
• Harmonix lays off small number of staffers
• Dragon’s Crown finally dated as it draws fresh criticism for sexy imagery

Mobile News

• Square Enix teams up with Mobage for a new Final Fantasy Tactics
• American McGee reveals Hell Invaders F2P card battler for mobile devices
• Zynga launches Draw Something 2; terrible artists weep
• Smartphone game explores 2011 London riots with arcadey gameplay
• Chartboost expands mobile game developer cross-promotion business into Europe

Earnings and Acquisitions

• Zynga hits earnings targets and stays profitable in Q1
• Nintendo reports a small profit for fiscal year, but Wii U sales slow to a crawl
• Nordic Games Licensing acquires Red Faction, Darksiders, and other THQ assets for $4.9M
• Gearbox Software wins auction for Homeworld
• In March: BioShock Infinite does 878K on consoles; 14 titles cleared 100K

Tech

• Hey, cord cutters, the CW is now providing full TV episodes via Xbox Live
• Unity ceases Adobe Flash support
• No need to get off the couch. Gamers can order Pizza Hut using Xbox Live
• See Skyrim running on the Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset

Woops

• Origin store ‘Action Sale’ includes games that … activates on Steam?
• U.K. retailer Tesco pulls listing for Call of Duty: Ghosts after ‘it was put up accidentally’
• An indie developer’s strategy to sell games: insult fans and raise prices
• Former Activision U.K. PR executive pleads guilty to embezzling Call of Duty money (Updated)
• The 700 Club’s Pat Robertson: People should ‘flee from evil’ video games

Nintendo’s new plan

• Nintendo sets the Wii U to ludicrous speed with latest patch
• A digital olive branch: Ubisoft releases Rayman Legends Challenges on Wii U eShop
• Nintendo not holding a press conference at this year’s E3; smaller events planned
• Nintendo announces launch lineup for Virtual Console on Wii U

Nextbox

• Microsoft officially revealing next-generation Xbox on May 21

All This Funding

• PlayFirst raises $2M in funding as it debuts a new franchise character
• The playable races Kickstarter backers created for Stardrive
• Jagged Alliance: Flashback Kickstarter is live
• Skullgirls studio can’t pay development team because PayPal froze its account (updated)

Reviews

• Monaco’s co-op gameplay will steal your heart (review)
• Injustice: Gods Among Us is superpowered insanity (review)
• Dead Island: Riptide is a zombie game still searching for brains (review)
• Defiance is Borderlands: The MMO without the humor (review)

Previews

• The new towers and heroes in Kingdom Rush: Frontiers (preview)
• Call of Juarez: Gunslinger doesn’t do the Wild West justice (preview)

Interviews

• Aiming for better profits, Zynga cuts even deeper into once-beloved games (interview)
• Lost Planet 3 is repositioning the franchise for mainstream success (interview)
• Bringing characters to life with Pixar’s animator magic (interview)
• Creating a creature with 5.5M pieces of animated hair in Pixar’s Monsters University (interview)

Pieces of Flair

• Consoles that won’t die: The Atari Jaguar
• One of the fake languages from HBO’s ‘Game of Thrones’ hides a reference to Castlevania
• If today’s developers made NES games (gallery)
• How Pixar made Monsters University, its latest technological marvel
• Pong, anyone? Philly skyscraper becomes the world’s largest video game
• Video games are the new Thin Mints: Girl Scouts add new badge for game design

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Co-op gaming is often magical. When done right, it enables gamers to team up and have a great time with friends and family that are not as skilled as they might be.

Monaco, out now for PC and soon for Xbox Live Arcade, does co-op right.

Monaco is a 2D stealth-action title that stars a number of differently skilled criminals. The plot has them robbing banks, jewelry stores, and just about anything else that might have valuables.

Like most robberies (not that I would know), you can lay down an intricate plan, but it’s better to stay on your toes and adapt to the situation as it unfolds.

Developer Pocketwatch Games introduced Monaco in 2010 at the Independent Game Festival, where it won the top prize for its multiplayer gameplay. It’s clear that lead designer Andy Schatz had nailed down the co-op early on. What was less clear is whether Pocketwatch was able to justify Monaco as a single-player experience.

Monaco offers up plenty of opportunities to do that, and it really works as a co-op game. The single player? Well, not so much.

What you’ll like

A unique, riotous multiplayer experience

Monaco is at its best when you have a full team of thieves and robbers all tackling one level at the same time.

Sure, you can take your time with a bunch of other highly skilled players to make sure everyone knows their job and how to approach the objectives. That works, and it’s fun.

It’s equally fun to go into the game with your less-skilled friends that just want to blindly rush the stage.

It’s hilarious to have a couple of players sneaking around only to have one person trip the security system and watch as everyone fans out like lunatics in search of a hiding spot.

Monaco as more than a half dozen characters to choose from for many of its levels. Each of those thieves has a special ability, and players tend to gravitate toward the one that best suits their play style.

Passive gamers might work well with The Lookout, who can see enemy locations and movement through walls. Aggressive players might like The Cleaner, who can knock out opponents by running them over.

I prefer The Mole, who can dig through walls but makes a lot of noise when doing so.

The possible combinations of teams offer up a plethora of ways for players to interact with Monaco’s systems. It’s magical to discover solutions to problems by playing around with your character’s abilities and to see how they enable another player to better use their skills.

Monaco supports both online play with matchmaking or local multiplayer for an amazing couch co-op experience.

The visuals have a strong style

Monaco is the latest modern title to take on the simple aesthetics of earlier games. Players view all of the action from a top-down perspective, and the characters are just a few blocks stacked on top of one another.

Despite a deluge of titles that use 8-bit games as a visual reference point, Monaco’s imagery does manage to stand out from the pixel-art crowd.

The top-down viewpoint allows the developer to emulate line-of-sight vision, where the player can only view what the onscreen character would actually see. It grays out the rest of the level. This creates a neat graphical effect; the vision cones swoop across the level and through open doors as you’re sneaking through hallways.

Each level also has several nice graphical touches that help bring the 2D world to life. Running water, security lasers, and a colorful dance floor are just a few examples. The menu system’s block typeface and slightly glowing neon design is another.

What you won’t like

It takes time to understand what you’re looking at

Monaco is a very pretty game, but its visuals do cause some problems. I had a few times where I didn’t really understand what I was looking at.

The perspective and simplified visuals provide a lot of information about the world, but it takes a few hours to really decipher what is important and what is not.

It can be difficult to always know which way a guard is looking or whether a certain block is passable. When you’re with other people, this isn’t as much of an issue since others can quickly help you out. Solo players might find it more frustrating when it gets you caught and you lose a life.

Single-player campaign can get lonely

Monaco totally works as a solo game. It just isn’t quite as fun.

In single-player, you choose one character and try to beat the stage. If you die, you pick up from a checkpoint with one of the other characters. Weirdly, nothing is really permanent. If you knock everyone out with The Cleaner and die, all of those enemies come back after you pick up from the last checkpoint.

The developers have a deep score-tracking system. If you start score chasing with a few friends, I could see the solitary game offering up a lot of excitement, but it can’t match the rush of working together with other humans.

Conclusion

Monaco is an amazing co-op game. It works both as an arcade-style romp and as strategic game that rewards deep thinkers.

If you don’t want to play with others, however, I would skip it. Everyone else should invite some friends over for some wild elbow-bumping couch cooperative action.

80/100

Monaco is out now on PC and soon on Xbox Live Arcade. The publisher provided GamesBeat with a download code for the purposes of this review.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Injustice: Gods Among Us is a silly name for a game focused on one of the most disastrous “What Ifs” in DC Comics: What would happen if Superman lost his mind? The answer is create a menacing one-world government fueled by his descent into madness. Built in a similar style to NetherRealm Studio’s successful Mortal Kombat games, Injustice scales down the gratuitous violence just a tad and replaces it with sheer superhuman spectacle.

I’m the biggest fan of Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe, but Injustice redeems itself with a touching and well-executed story mode that makes you feel like you’re doing more than playing one arena fight after another. Most of all, NetherRealm manages to make the audience care about Superman — a feat rarely achieved thanks to the character’s seemingly impervious moral code.

Good, dynamic Superman stories are possible. Legendary comic book writer Alan Moore proved that in For the Man Who Has Everything, a story arc in which Mongul (the ruler of the weapon-planet Warworld) imprisons the Man of Steel in his mind, and the only means of escape is to destroy what he cherishes most. Injustice takes that sentiment and makes it a thousand times worse, and sprinkles in a touch of interdimensional travel.

What you’ll like

Over-the-top but totally accessible combat

Characters in Injustice build individual fighting styles off of the same basic set of controls. One quick combo for Superman has the same controls as a similar attack for Batman, but only the speed of the strike differs. Heroes (and villains) that use special powers, like Green Lantern and his ring, also have switchable fighting stances. Injustice introduces these mechanics with Batman and Superman. Once you master those two, you can control anyone. The real difference between “tech” and “super-powered” characters is just how fast they are.

Where the combat really shines is Injustice’s clever take on the classic Mortal Kombat fatality. Rather than splattering ridiculous amounts of blood everywhere, these special supermoves highlight the excesses of a character’s power. When you use Hawk Girl’s special attack, she grabs her opponent by the collar and hurls them into the sky, where she repeatedly beats them with her mace before hurling back toward the ground. You get a light amount of blood splatter from this, but you’re more overwhelmed by the sheer spectacle than by the gore. She didn’t have to repeatedly bash your face in while falling through the air, but it sure looked cool.

The best thing about Injustice’s design is that it works well with a normal controller. A lot of fighting games feel stunted when you use a standard directional pad or analog stick instead of a fighting stick, but Injustice keeps up. I’m sure I would have had an easier time besting the A.I. if I were using a stick, though.

Intriguing story mode

I love Injustice’s story. It’s rare that I find myself caring about Superman. He’s too good, too shiny, and that generally leads to flat stories about triumphing over evil. But when his stories truly captivate me, Superman is struggling with himself to do the right thing for mankind. Without giving too much away, this tale utilizes many of the same elements found in Greek mythology, primarily Hercules’ stories. Hercules and Superman are very similar – both are powerful figures but are often blinded by their naïve hope that the world isn’t full of corruption.

Injustice preys on Superman’s worst fear: that he is unknowingly used as a weapon. This has direct ties to a Hercules myth where he commits terrible acts of violence thanks to Hera’s manipulation. In Injustice, the Joker assumes the role of Hera as he pushes Superman beyond his breaking point.

Mostly, I really like being able to draw mythical connections in popular culture.

Smashing through walls and throwing missiles

One of the most iconic things about superheroes is how most of them use their environment to do the fighting. Throwing cars and crashing through buildings is an everyday occurrence in most comics, and brought to life in the interactive stages in Injustice. Each arena has two segments that fighters can bash through. If you’re unlucky enough to get thrown from one part of the stage to the other, you’ll see your character crash through walls, planes, and giant fans as they tumble to the next area.

Beyond throwing people around, each stage also has usable items like discarded missiles and cars. Correctly timing your attack near one of these objects will cause your character to pick up or smash someone into them with all their might. My particular favorite moment was repeatedly smacking the Flash with missles as he tried to throw me.

What you won’t like

Online multiplayer

The trouble with playing fighting games online is that a lot of players will focus on easily exploitable tricks and moves to dominate the rankings. From my admittedly brief experience with this, I saw a lot of ranged characters crouching in the corner of the screen just spamming their long-distance attacks. I’ve even seen two of the same character repeatedly shoot at each other in the most boring fight, ever.

Rather than risk attacking up close and deal with the quagmire of blocking and throws, a lot of people playing online right now focus on such exploitative tricks. I didn’t particularly enjoy how gruff assassin Deathstroke moved while playing through the story mode, but every other person I encountered online used him. Deathstroke as a relatively simple long-range attack and is the main offender in crouching on one side of the level and just unleashing hell.

Hopefully, as more people start playing Injustice, this experience will change. Right now, I am so sick of seeing Deathstroke fight himself.

Repetitive computer behavior

Fighting titles are notorious for imbalanced challenge in their later stages, and Injustice definitely suffers from that. But the challenge I faced while finishing up the story and battle modes was the A.I.’s overreliance on a small set of moves — most of which are virtually unblockable throws. You can counter a throw in Injustice, but the timing is difficult, and I’ve honestly not pulled it off outside of the slower-paced training sessions.

Did this color my opinion of the A.I.’s behavior? Absolutely. I do not enjoy the feeling that I’m punching at a brick wall that seems to get priority over every combo I pull. You can do some amazing, and devastating, things in Injustice, but the artificial intelligence is right behind you. My strategy against this was spamming a quick set of moves in turn so I would move in fast and do a simple three button sequence to keep the A.I. at bey.

I don’t like playing that way, but I was beating the computer at its own move-spamming game. Hopefully you have better luck countering throws.

Touchy interactive items

I really love the interactivity found in Injustice, but sometimes it simply doesn’t work. Using items against your opponent is the same as executing a throw, only when you input the move in front of an interactive set piece, you will use that rather than the scripted throw animation. This requires you to position yourself with care or time your jumps so you can bring ceiling elements down on your enemy’s head.

The trouble is that when you’re rushing back and forth across a stage, this is often cumbersome. I rarely used the ceiling attacks, largely because the A.I. seemed to always lock onto them perfectly despite my repeated attempts to use the action previously. Stage transitions also seemed very tricky to use correctly, and most of the time I had to wait for my opponent to throw me before I could see the rest of a stage.

These are really cool elements in theory, but the often hectic pace in the average fight makes using items and transitions tricky.

Conclusion

Injustice’s greatest strength is that it makes you feel powerful regardless of your skill level. Even when you are struggling to overcome a series of grueling attacks, breaking through that with a well-placed combo or ridiculous supermove brings out the wonder in controlling an iconic hero or villain. NetherRealm was very clever with how they brought out the Mortal Kombat in Injustice. You get just enough MK for the fighting system to feel familiar, but not enough that you’re constantly suffering at the hands of other players who are much more experienced.

I wish Injustice felt more balanced. Maybe it’s the unpredictable nature of the interactive environments, or the frustrating move-spamming, but I frequently felt I was beating my head against a wall. Injustice really wants to bring in inexperienced players, and it is very approachable at first. But playing online or slogging through the various challenge modes becomes infuriating as you pick up on how your opponents exploit the game in ways you likely won’t understand at first.

Score: 85/100

Injustice: Gods Among Us is a fighting game released April 16, 2013 for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii U. Warner Brothers provided an Xbox 360 copy of the game for this review. 

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Zombies are everywhere these days, making it harder and harder to actually use them in a new way. Publisher Deep Silver launched Dead Island in 2011, and the title tried to make its mark by combining first-person-shooter and role-playing elements. But the experience had a few too many issues to really revolutionize its genre. Now, original developer Techland is back with Dead Island: Riptide (available on April 23 for PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360), and while the studio claims the game is more of a spin-off than a true sequel, it still carries on the same plot and hopes to correct some of the first release’s missteps. Unfortunately, some of those missteps are the fault of using the undead as an enemy in the first place, which means Riptide has to prove itself not only as an improvement in the Dead Island franchise but also as a worthy entry into an already overcrowded gaming space.

So is Dead Island: Riptide a survivor, or should you avoid it like a corpse-reanimating plague?

What You’ll Like

It’s the complete zombie experience
Zombie-related media tends to feature a handful of tried-and-true story beats related to living through the apocalypse. A small group of survivors will almost always encounter other survivors. They’ll go scavenging for supplies. Maybe they’ll get in a vehicle and run over a few creatures. And then, they’ll have to fortify some type of area in order to hold off waves of the living dead. If that’s something you want to sample for yourself, then Riptide certainly comes through. It’s a first-person-shooter-meets-role-playing hybrid that is all about foraging for equipment. Most of Riptide’s 13 chapters end with you and your band of survivors — who include other player-controlled characters — defending a small space from a hundred or so infected islanders while you wait for a water pump to clear out an underground tunnel or whatever.

Riptide even takes special care to include the different types of undead that have appeared in pop culture over the years. Do you like 28 Days Later-esque screaming runners or director George Romero’s shambling animated corpses from Night of the Living Dead? Both are in the game, and these enemies are known as Infected and Walkers, respectively. You even fight a few Left 4 Dead-style fancy monsters that spit at you or tackle you with super strength. This was all mostly present for the original Dead Island as well, but Riptide understands that it doesn’t need to change something that the first entry got completely right.

Plus, you can experience the whole game in co-op, either with friends or via level-based matchmaking that pairs you with people at a similar point in the campaign, which is always a plus.

Melee combat is consistently satisfying
As you can expect from a title called Dead Island: Riptide, you spend most of your time killing zombies. You cut off heads. You smash heads. You shoot off heads. It’s all cheery, family friendly stuff, but the point is that almost all of it is a blast. The combat doesn’t have much depth beyond improving weapons and choosing when to deploy your super attacks (character-specific moves powered by a “rage meter” that fills up as you get more kills), but it never feels too limited or boring. That’s the great strength of using a horde of zombies as the antagonists: Smashing them to death is a lot of fun. Of course, part of that fun comes from learning the benefits of the different weapon types and seeing which fit with your play style the best. Blunt objects, like baseball bats or hammers, have stopping power that will make it easier for you to get hostiles to the ground (where you can get in an insta-killing head stomp) while blade weapons can slice off limbs and are easier to retrieve after you throw them. Speaking of throwing weapons, they are easily the most fun part of the combat. It’s completely badass to throw an electrified samurai sword at a giant zombie, then charge at the beast with a meat tenderizer covered in nails, then rip the sword out and hack the monster to death. That is easily one of my favorite ways to kill a video game enemy ever.

The game’s firearms are considerably less fun to use, which is a shame since they become more and more common as you progress through the story. The gun mechanics are passable, but they aren’t powerful enough to justify how scarce ammo is. Thankfully, Riptide barely forces you to use guns, so it’s not a big issue. You can always go back to your ironic firefighter’s axe that sets things on fire.

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While Defiance has its fun moments and features a ton of content, it also feels unfinished, paying no more than lip service to the TV show while saddling players with bland graphics, an unintuitive user interface, and performance issues.

What you’ll like

The combat is fast-paced and satisfying

Right now, Defiance is the closest thing we have to a Borderlands MMO. Its gameplay will feel instantly familiar to anyone who’s played Gearbox Software’s popular shooter on consoles or PC. It takes place in a not-so-distant postapocalyptic future where, after years of terraforming and war, enterprising souls called Ark Hunters scour the San Francisco area for valuable alien technology. As one of these hired guns, you’ll spend most of your time cruising the game world on ATVs, shooting at assorted mutants, bugs, and cyborgs and collecting loot. It’s not revolutionary, but it’s satisfying and a welcome break from traditional fantasy role-playing MMOs like World of Warcraft.

Defiance further differentiates itself from other titles in the genre by ditching character classes and skill rotations in favor of four unique combat abilities: Cloak, Blur, Decoy, and Overcharge. Surrounding each ability are passive perks used to further flesh out your character. With them, you can turn your Ark Hunter into a powerful sniper, a “rogue” who can sneak behind enemies to deal extra damage, a close-range brawler, or a combat medic who distracts enemies with a decoy while reviving teammates. Eventually, you’ll be able to branch out and choose perks situated near other abilities, giving that combat medic some much needed damage boosts near the Cloak skill, for example. Perks can be reset at any time for a little Scrip (in-game currency) while multiple loadouts let you store your favorite builds.

Player vs. player options are limited but adequate. There’s the usual 6-vs.-6 and 8-vs.-8 deathmatches, along with a larger 64-vs.-64 point capture mode called Shadow War. These competitive matches take advantage of the game’s solid shooter mechanics to create an experience that is as fun and fast-paced as a round of Call of Duty or Halo. It’s just a shame there are no more modes available right now (where’s capture the flag, Trion?).

Dynamic events are chaotic fun

Like Trion Worlds’ other MMO, Rift, Defiance features dynamic events. These events, called “Arkfalls,” appear randomly on the map and usually include multiple stages of enemies culminating in some sort of boss fight. When dozens of players congregate in these areas, Arkfalls become a chaotic, enjoyable mess filled with bullets and explosions. They’re also the best way to collect Key Codes, which unlock boxes filled with randomly generated rewards.

The spirit of cooperation shared during Arkfalls extends to Defiance’s story and co-op missions as well. The main story missions take place in the open game world, and you’ll often receive unexpected help from other players working on the same objectives. If they’ve already started the mission, you still get credit, eliminating the need to “camp” an area to achieve your goal. The four-player co-op missions are Defiance’s version of instanced dungeons. They’re short, largely unscripted affairs that I felt could use a bit more storytelling to make them more compelling.

What you won’t like

The graphics are ‘meh’

Defiance is a multiplatform game, and it’s clear some concessions were made while developing it for consoles, especially in the graphics department. PC players might feel like they got the short end of the stick when they see its lackluster textures and short draw distances obscured by fog. Facial animations are stiff; it’s as if everyone in the game was recently given a free Botox injection. On the plus side, it has some nice lens flare from time to time, and lower graphics means more accessibility for people with less-than-stellar PCs.

The user interface also suffers from Defiance’s multiplatform development. Although you can play with a keyboard and mouse, it was clearly designed with controllers in mind. Navigating menus is a chore. Even the simple act of logging out requires three or four button presses. First you press Start (or Escape) to bring up one menu, and then you hold the Left Trigger (Space Bar) to bring up a menu wheel. Then you press X to log out and hit “Yes” to confirm. It’s as irritating as it sounds. Defiance also seems to lack some features that PC users expect, like an easy way to hide the U.I. while taking screenshots.

Character generation is lacking compared to other titles in the MMO genre. You encounter a few alien races during your travels, but you can only choose one of two for your character: human or slightly less human. Defiance calls them “Irathient,” but really they just look like Vincent from Beauty and the Beast cosplaying as a Mad Max extra. People who love customizing every little detail of their character’s appearance might be disappointed with the game’s shallow options.

It feels unfinished

Trion and Syfy made a lot of noise over how their game and TV show will cross with each other, but so far that connection seems nebulous. About a handful of so-called Episode Missions featuring the show’s main characters, Nolan and Irisa, explain what they were up to before they arrive in St. Louis, where the show is based. And that’s pretty much it. Without having seen the pilot episode, it’s hard to say if other ties exist in the game. But for now, Defiance’s transmedia experiment feels shallow and gimmicky.

Arkfalls are a great idea but fall victim to repetitiveness. Fighting off a hellbug invasion sounds great at first, but after you’ve done that same event numerous times, it quickly grows stale. For a game that offers so many missions and challenges, it’s a shame it doesn’t offer more variety in its dynamic events, which are one of its defining features.

Traditional MMO fans looking for any sort of “endgame” are going to be disappointed. There doesn’t seem to be any raids or heroic dungeons. Like Borderlands, you’re expect to finish the main story missions, then wait for Trion to release new content. Luckily, there’s no subscription required, so you won’t feel like you’re wasting your money while you wait for DLC.

Then there are the technical issues. Every MMO suffers from them during launch, and Defiance is no exception. The servers are mostly stable, in my experience, but I’ve encountered noticeable lag. There’s a perceptible delay when switching between weapons or interacting with objects. Enemies take a second or two to drop dead once their health is depleted. These issues mostly disappear while playing instanced co-op and PvP, so hopefully it’s something Trion can work on in the future.

Conclusion

To its credit, Trion Worlds is handling Defiance’s launch problems well. The company has kept players updated with a constant stream of blog posts on the official website, poking fun at itself along the way. It released a large patch to fix bugs and improve server and client stability. It’s also working to improve the game’s terrible voice chat. (Seriously, it’s bad. Use a third-party program like Skype to communicate with your buddies. You’ll thank me later.)

Despite my complaints, I want to stress that I’m having a good time playing Defiance. None of its issues are game-breaking; Trion will most likely fix many of them over time. While its story and graphics are uninspired, its sci-fi setting and skill-based combat are a refreshing change from its pointy-eared, min-maxing, level-grinding brethren. But you might want to wait for a price drop before giving it a chance.

Score: 65/100

Defiance launched on the PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 on April 2, 2013. Trion Worlds provided GamesBeat with a PC version of Defiance for the purpose of this review.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best video game stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, Clash of Clans developer Supercell is now valued at $770 million and raised $130 million in February, Bethesda wraps up major Skyrim updates, and Disney fully embraces transmedia integration in Disney Infinity.

You’ll also find reviews for ShootMania, Cut the Rope: Time Travel, and a Threeview for BioShock Infinite, as well as our early impressions for Defiance.

News

• The DeanBeat: Defiance is inescapable transmedia that you’ll want to escape
• The Evil Within is the new survival-horror title from Resident Evil creator Mikami
• Nintendo finally releases the Circle Pad Pro for the 3DS XL in North America
• Angry Birds maker Rovio hires new exec to lead game development
• OnLive improves game-streaming performance with new optimization options
• Microsoft determined to make Xbox 360 more popular in Japan
• TimeGate loses appeal: Court orders Section 8 developer to pay $7.3M in damages
• Valued at $770M, Clash of Clans game studio Supercell raises $130M
• How Digital Chocolate teamed with Betable to launch a real-money gambling game in the U.K.
• Ex-Call of Duty team at Respawn Entertainment files for new trademark
• 2K Games is removing evidence of the XCOM shooter from the Internet
• Bethesda says farewell to more major Skyrim updates
• EA pulls the plug on 3 Facebook games

Mobile news

• Chinese ‘app store’ lets you install pirated iPhone apps — without jailbreaking
• PopCap releases Bookworm Heroes for iOS
• Hold on, mobile gaming monetization ain’t as easy as it looks
• Former Unity execs reveal cyberpunk tactics game for tablets
• With $11.3M to back it, Music Mastermind’s Zya app will turn consumers into music creators
• Papaya’s AppFlood helps developers monetize games in lucrative Chinese market
• Pocket Gems evolves from a successful developer into a mobile game publisher

Tech news

• Benchmark reveals Ouya’s aging Tegra 3 can’t keep up with newest Android phones

NPDs and future plans

• March 2013 NPD: Industry slumps another 10 percent as BioShock Infinite tops the charts
• Xbox division up big for Microsoft in Q3; Xbox Live has 46M members
• Japan’s Capcom slashes forecast and cancels games
• U.S. digital game revenues were stable in March, Superdata says

Exciting announcements

• Bethesda revealing Shinji Mikami’s horror game tomorrow: Here are the clues
• Breaking down what’s old and new in the 3DS’s upcoming lineup
• 3DS Nintendo Direct trailer roundup: Earthbound, new Link to the Past, and more
• Here’s a quick look at Yoshi’s Island for the 3DS
• Nintendo is making a new Zelda set in the A Link to the Past universe for 3DS
• The Legend of Zelda: Oracle games heading to 3DS eShop
• EarthBound coming to the Wii U Virtual Console this year
• Winged Pikmin take to the sky in the Wii U release this August
• Mario Party coming to Nintendo 3DS this winter
• Nintendo explains how it made Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D easier
• Mario & Luigi: Dream Team due out August 11

Interviews

• ‘Terminator’ actor Michael Biehn talks voicing Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon’s hero
• Signia Venture Partners’ Rick Thompson delivers the über-investor’s take on mobile gaming investments (interview)

Reviews

• Cut the Rope: Time Travel is a charmingly addictive puzzler with a few new tricks (review)
• Defiance is not your normal massively multiplayer online game (first impressions)
• Threeview: BioShock Infinite reviewed by a critic, an analyst, and an academic
• ShootMania Storm excels at shooter simplicity and customization (review)

Previews

• Disney Infinity takes shape as a huge investment in transmedia (hands-on preview)

Pieces of flair

• The uncanny similarities between the original BioShock and Infinite (gallery)
• Read+Watch+Listen: Bonus material for BioShock Infinite fans
• 10 better-than-Hollywood video game cosplayers
• Camp Minecraft: How educators use the block-building game to inspire kids to code
• Racing with friends: PS4′s DriveClub vs. PC’s Auto Club Revolution

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Unless you’re a heartless monster, the sight of cute pets who need our tender love and care is simply irresistible in video games. For proof, just look back at the 1990s, where the Tamagotchi craze began (and quickly died) alongside the Pokémon and Digimon games.

Developer ZeptoLab tapped into this innate desire when it released the first Cut the Rope for mobile phones and tablets in 2010. The goal was simple: feed the weird green monster (called Om Nom) some candy by solving physics-based puzzles. Almost three years and 300 million downloads later — and after a successful sequel with Cut the Rope: Experiments, a Chinese New Year-related update called Cut the Rope: Lantern Box, a comic book, lucrative merchandising deals, and the launch of an animated web series — ZeptoLab is ready to unveil its newest Cut the Rope game.

Cut the Rope: Time Travel (out today for iOS and Android devices and reviewed on an iPhone 4S) isn’t a radical departure from its predecessors, but it’s just as addicting. The biggest change is that you now have two Om Noms to feed in each level: the one from the present and an ancestor from its family’s past, like a warrior from the Middle Ages or an artist from the Renaissance. Future updates to Time Travel will include new levels as well as the second season of the animated Om Nom Stories (the first episode comes out May 4), which you can watch from within the game.

In other words, Cut the Rope: Time Travel continues ZeptoLab’s quest of transforming Om Nom into not just a popular video game monster, but also as a widely recognizable cartoon character.

What you’ll like

The adorable Om Nom

How can you not love Om Nom’s face? ZeptoLab has done a great job of turning a green blob with stubby legs and huge eyes into a lovable character that you just want to squish to pieces — it’s like the long lost cousin of Gizmo and Stitch. From the cartoon, we know that Om Nom has a bit of a personality, too: It’s rambunctious and has a child-like sense of wonder (which led it to stumble into a mysterious time machine in the first place). Om Nom oozes the kind of charm that both adults and children can appreciate.

Just the right level of difficulty

While the first 90 levels (which I completed in about two hours) steadily adds new challenges, it never feels too overwhelming. Familiar obstacles and tools like ropes, rockets, and bouncing platforms are still here, as well as new ones like portals and the ability to stop time (see the gallery below for a full list). Trying to figure out which object to activate first is a lot like applying the order of operations to a math problem: If you accidentally set off something or mess up in just one area, you’ll probably have to restart the level.

Like in the first two Cut the Rope games, however, I never felt truly stumped. Just when I’m thinking about using Om Nom’s telepathic powers (it has a finite amount of uses) to cheat by pushing candies to its mouth, I find a way to pass the level. It isn’t always the most elegant solution, nor do I always earn a perfect three-star rating, but it’s still rewarding to solve Time Travel’s complex visual equations.

Cut the Rope: Time Travel screenshots

What you won’t like 

Pesky ads asking you for money

Nothing takes you out of the experience like an ad that constantly reminds you that you can refill Om Nom’s superpowers with real money. You’re given a few to start off with, but the message pops up if you’re repeatedly failing a level. I suppose the prices aren’t too insane (from 20 uses for $1.99 up to 1,000 uses for $19.99), especially since the game costs about a buck or three depending on the platform, but it’s just another stark reminder that mobile games are not afraid to put their business models front and center.

Conclusion

Cut the Rope: Time Travel is the type of time-wasting game that mobile devices excel at. Most of the levels takes seconds or minutes to solve and it’s easily double that amount for dedicated players going for the coveted three-star rating in every level. Having two mouths to feed doesn’t change the formula all that much, but when combined with the funny time traveling premise and the upcoming cartoon, ZeptoLab gives you more than a few good reasons to come back to Om Nom again.

Score: 80/100

Cut the Rope: Time Travel is out now for iOS ($0.99 for iPhone and iPod touch, $2.99 for iPad) and Android devices ($0.99 on Google Play). The publisher provided GamesBeat with the iOS version for the purpose of this review.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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We’ve heard nothing but near-universal love for BioShock Infinite, so we didn’t expect the game to be very polarizing. But one of our Threeview reviewers wasn’t as crazy about the recently released shooter (PC, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3) as we expected her to be (albeit this is her looking at the game through an academic lens as we requested, not as a gamer). At the same time, one of our other reviewers liked it a lot more than we thought. It just goes to show how little we actually know about our guest writers and their crazy opinions.

Read on to see what our own critic, an industry analyst, and a smart-as-heck academic (and former games journalist) think of what many people are already calling 2013′s Game of the Year.

Warning: Spoilers ahead.

BioShock Infinite: The critic’s review

• By Jeff Grubb, GamesBeat news reporter

BioShock Infinite is a great game.

The combat is fun. The pacing is excellent. The world is fleshed out and filled with interesting things to discover. While portions of the story’s ending disappointed me, I don’t feel cheated because it was such an enjoyable ride.

Infinite’s biggest issue is that the stiff nonplayer characters really dampen the impact of the social themes. Irrational worked so hard building this world filled with terrible racial imagery, but it’s difficult to feel the effects of that when I can’t relate to the mechanical mannequins that populate Columbia.

It’s actually a minor complaint, but it’s very noticeable in a product that is otherwise so exquisitely put together.

Read the full GamesBeat review.

Final critic’s score: 89/100

BioShock Infinite: The analyst’s review

• By Michael Pachter, managing director, Wedbush Securities
• Twitter: @michaelpachter

There really isn’t anything I can say about BioShock Infinite that does the game justice. Game of the year? Definitely. Most interesting game I’ve seen? Yes. Captivating till the end? I’m not quite finished (that pesky job keeps getting in the way), but from what I’ve played so far, it just seems to keep getting better.

Publisher Take-Two has a practice of letting its developers create art, and the company’s management gets out of the way. This is a risky strategy if the developers are unproven, but Take-Two has assembled some of the best development teams on the planet, and the guys at Irrational might be the best in the organization. Ken Levine and team has been working on BioShock Infinite since late 2007, and their work shows in this highly polished, compelling game.

I’m not a game reviewer, so my opinion about quality should be disregarded. However, with an average Metacritic rating of 95 from a total of 62 critics, this game appears to be a can’t-miss proposition. That said, I think that the interesting storyline will generate significant buzz all year-long, and I expect BioShock Infinite to sell 5 million copies quickly — and a likely additional 3 million copies for the remainder of the year. I expect the game to have solid sales for the next few years, as sadly, we’re not likely to see another game from Irrational for a while. Classics such as this one tend to have robust catalog sales.

With five-and-a-half years of development, BioShock Infinite was an expensive game to make; my estimate is that the team earned around $10 million per year, so the game cost an estimated $55 million to make. The typical marketing budget for a game is 15 percent of estimated sales, so it is likely that Take-Two spent another $45 million or so promoting the game. At that level of spending, BioShock Infinite is likely to be very profitable, with front-loading of expenses and back-loading of profits, given that Take-Two shipped the game in the last week of the company’s fiscal 2013 fourth quarter. I think that BioShock Infinite proves that good things are worth waiting for, and I cannot say enough about how much I am enjoying the game.

Final analyst’s score: 100/100

BioShock Infinite: The academic’s review

• By Jane Pinckard, associate director of the Center for Games and Playable Media, UC Santa Cruz
• Former producer, 1UP Show
• Twitter: @miyukijane

“They’re all dead … you killed those people. You’re a monster!”

“What did you think was going to happen?”

The complex layering of themes in BioShock Infinite invites analysis within diverse frameworks: as dystopian post-colonial narrative; the use of violence as a rhetorical device; as a classical tragedy illustrating that “character is destiny”; an investigation of historical determinism; but primarily it is a bleak existential fable that illustrates Sartre’s concept of bad faith.

The antihero Booker, witness to (and, we infer, participant in) the massacre at Wounded Knee, may blast his way through the many human targets in the game, but he is ultimately trapped by being in bad faith: alienated from his own self and unable to take responsibility for his actions. In Sartre’s foundational existential play No Exit, a character realizes near the end that “[h]ell is other people.” In this case, hell is Booker himself and by extension, the player too is forced into bad faith.

Bad faith happens when one renounces the authentic self; it indicates both a failure to take on the burden of free will and a need to define one’s self through the eyes of others. In No Exit, the three characters continually look to each other for confirmation of who they are, to no avail — that is the hell they are trapped in. Booker is presumptively on a path to redemption, but from the first apparently meaningful choice given the player (when Booker is offered baptism upon arriving in Columbia), it’s clear that this is no choice at all. The player, in order to advance through the game, must accept the baptism — or stop playing.

In this way the narrative is profoundly un-interactive, even anti-interactive, in a way that feels inauthentic within the fiction of the game. In the above example, presumably Booker could have punched out the old preacher or simply shouldered him aside and run past him. But the game does not make these actions available. Under these circumstances it is logical that the player gives up responsibility for any choice at all. Through a clever semantic twist involving interdimensional travel, the game attempts to justify the lack of meaningful choice by suggesting that because Booker has already done every act in this particular universe, he must do each act to maintain consistency. All such meaningful actions are predetermined. It’s an interesting philosophical quandary but noninteractivity evokes despair rather than redemption, nihilism rather than creation. One could argue that illustrating bad faith is a central theme of the game, but does the point need to be made over and over during 18 hours of gameplay?

“What did you think was going to happen?” Booker asks Elizabeth when she protests the trail of dead he has left behind after a combat encounter. What indeed? This is a first-person shooter, and we are bound to its rules. There is no choice but to shoot our way through.

Final academic’s score: 70/100

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Multiplayer shooters have changed. It’s hard to believe that we used to pay full price for packages like Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 Arena when the most popular takes on the genre today are either free-to-play (like Team Fortress 2 or Tribes: Ascend) or packaged with an expensive-looking, plot-heavy single-player campaign (like the Call of Duty series).

Now comes ShootMania Storm, a newly released competitive first-person shooter for the PC from Nadeo, the folks behind the popular racing series TrackMania. Bucking all trends, ShootMania doesn’t offer customizable outfits, experience points and player levels, a large collection of upgradable weapons, or melee instant-kills. For one price ($20), you get everything ShootMania has to offer and anything else its players can create.

This is a welcome return to a long-gone era.

What You’ll Like

Beauty in simplicity

For most of ShootMania’s standard modes, you have one gun and two bars of health. Additional weapons don’t litter the map. Sometimes you’ll enter specific zones that change your weapon as long as you stand in them, but these are few. You’ll spend most of your time with the rocket gun, which shoots slow, large plasma balls with a supply of unlimited, rechargeable ammo. And don’t let the whole “rocket” thing confuse you. Its rounds don’t cause splash damage, so you don’t want to aim at people’s feet. You need a direct hit to knock out your opponent’s health.

Compared to other shooters, this sounds almost archaic, but its simplicity has beauty. Everyone is on a level playing field. You’re not going to get stuck with a crappy pistol because you ran out of machine gun ammo. You also don’t have to worry about losing a fair firefight just because the other guy unlocked a level 99 assault weapon or knew the map well enough to always pick up the rocket launcher when it spawns.

Instead, almost all fights come down to skill, with two combatants dancing around each other as they try to lead their shots. What a pleasant change of pace from knifing and no-scoping.

Easy creation

While the core mechanics are simple, ShootMania offers plenty of room for customization and creation. The in-game map editor is better than any other I’ve used. Even the “advanced” tools are easy enough to understand thanks to a grid-based system of building and a convenient copy/paste function.

I mean, I actually made a map. You don’t understand — I’ve never made a shooter map before. Even with supposedly user-friendly modes like Halo’s Forge, I’ve never been able to make more than a random field of blocks that better resembled a graveyard than a fortress. But not only did I make a map for ShootMania Storm, I was actually shocked by how much it resembled an actual level. It wasn’t the next 2fort or Blood Gulch, but it was pretty decent for a first try. Imagine what I can do with practice.

Better yet, imagine what people far more talented than I could do. Well, have done, really. The community has already unleashed new maps and unique ways to play the game. One of my favorites user-created modes is the Obstacle Course, where players compete to see who can run through a challenging test of movement skills the fastest. Not only is this fun, but it actually opens my eyes to some of the intricacies of the design. I had no idea ShootMania even had wall-jumping until I needed to do use it to beat a level.

Unique modes

ShootMania also comes with some standard competitive modes. My favorite (and the most popular) is Royale, a free-for-all game in which players can score points by getting hits, being the last person standing, and by capturing a point in the middle of the map. Once someone activates the beacon in the center, a cyclone begins to engulf the map, eventually forcing everyone into a small, hectic circle of death. You keep playing rounds until someone reaches the points goal.

This is a great variation on a survival game mode. Even though being the last player alive nets you the most points, you can actually win the map without once earning that distinction. I actually achieved this myself by focusing on rushing and capturing the beacon at the start of each round. This would usually result in a quick death, but I was able to secure victory by hoarding the capture points while the other 15 players shared survival-winning duties.

Some modes accommodate smaller parties, like the 3-vs.-3 Elite, which sets a single, supercharged player from one team (each player from the team of three gets a turn) against all three members of the other. There’s even a match for 1-vs.-1 battles, Joust, where competitors have a limited supply of ammo that they can only refill by capturing beacons.

The point is that even without all the community creations, ShootMania offers plenty of entertainment.

What You Won’t Like

Confusing menus

As much fun as ShootMania is, the menus are awfully confusing. At the start I was able to pick from a bunch of buttons labeled after modes or from a giant one simply titled Storm. After stumbling through, I eventually figured out that going to Storm would show me every server. Of course, you can then use filters from there to specify what kind of game you want to play, which makes all of the individual buttons at the beginning unnecessary.

While the creation tools are a giant part of the experience, they are hard to find. Half the time ShootMania directed me to a page asking me if I wanted to rent a server when I was really trying to make a map. Also, if it has an easy way to look at everything that the community has made, I couldn’t find it. Instead, I just had to hope I found something cool while looking through the server list.

Weapon zones

I talked earlier about specific areas that change your default rocket launcher to a different weapon. While this is a nice idea in theory, they come off as pretty useless. These zones are so small and few that almost no one really bothers with them, and the new guns aren’t much better or different from the launcher.

Conclusion

I’ve become used to my shooters practically bribing me to keep playing them. “Maybe one more round and I’ll unlock a new hat.” “Maybe if I get a few more kills I’ll reach a new level.” It’s nice to get back to basics with ShootMania Storm and recall a time when we played for the joy of playing.

And while the creation tools offer a potential for unlimited greatness, the truth is that ShootMania is fun today.

82/100

ShootMania storm is out now for the PC. The publisher provided GamesBeat with a downloadable version of the game for the purposes of this review.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best video game stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, GamesBeat was at the 2013 Game Developer’s Conference, bringing you previews and interviews. Harmonix announced that it is working on three new games. And legendary developer Brenda Romero (formerly Brathwaite) quits the International Games Development Association after the organization threw a party with hired female dancers.

You’ll also find reviews for BioShock Infinite and The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct as well as previews for the Ouya console, Dive Kick, Battlefield 4, Infinite Crisis, and Space Hulk.

Game Developer’s Conference 2013

• In a ‘love letter to gamers,’ Ouya launches its console at a crowded GDC event (video)
• Game designer Brenda Romero quits IGDA following party with hired female dancers
• Women bring down the house at GDC
• YetiZen explains hiring of gamer models, not dancers, for its GDC party
• California’s second lady: Games need to ‘think bigger’ about portrayals of women
• Free-to-play publishers & game developers throw down at GDC

News

• The DeanBeat: Will Battlefield 4 or Puzzle & Dragons reach $1B in revenues?
• Epic launches new content and a title update for Gears of War: Judgment
• Intel in talks to acquire gesture control firm Omek Interactive
• ‘Programmers loathe’ developing games for Android, says Geomeric founder
• Marketing, reviews, and mobile may all determine if your game is a hit or a flop
• Total War series gets a League of Legends-style spin-off
• Playdek nails down $3.8M in funding for more digital board games
• Lab Zero Games ends Skullgirls crowdfunding campaign with $830K
• GameStop: One-third of BioShock Infinite buyers also purchased a Season Pass
• GameStop profits up despite dipping revenues, expects a ‘challenging’ 2013
• 505 Games shoveling Terraria to PlayStation Vita this summer
• A winning wager? Experts see a $20B market for gambling in games
• The Rock Band played on: Harmonix working on 3 new games
• Japanese telecom buys majority stake in Puzzle & Dragons developer GungHo
• Surprise! The Phantom Pain is actually Metal Gear Solid V
• Nintendo demos improvements due in April Wii U update
• Tecmo Koei slices off a few new details about Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z
• EA has a lot riding on Battlefield 4, and it’s stepping up its investment in a big way
• In Africa, devs struggle to create modern games for 3K cultures
• EA sets the stage for Battlefield 4 launch
• Minecraft developer chipping away at April release for Scrolls beta
• Facebook tells developers how to win at games in 2013
• King.com saw its Facebook desktop player numbers blossom after Candy Crush Saga’s mobile launch
• Unity Technologies forms alliance to create better games on Facebook
• Plants vs. Zombies shuffles to Facebook; sequel due in summer
• Sony steps up for indies with funding for PlayStation games
• Kuato teaches kids to code via Hakitzu educational game
• It’s a final fantasy for Square Enix president after restructuring
• Square Enix restructures and sells four free-to-play titles to Sleepy Giant (exclusive)
• PlayStation 3′s Rain may be the next Journey
• EA squashes potential Origin exploit
• Zynga chief information officer takes top job at cloud-storage company
• How The Unfinished Swan moved from student project to PS3 downloadable game
• Game retailers better than movie theaters at enforcing age restrictions
• Zynga flexes its marketing muscle to support third-party partner games
• Facebook updates developers on local currency pricing
• Roku should worry: GameStick adding XBMC media support
• Turbine working with DC Comics on League of Legends-style game
• Epic Games’ alliance with Oculus VR means virtual reality gaming will be coming to you
• Kickstarter campaign begins for a spiritual successor to Ecco the Dolphin (exclusive)
• EA and Insomniac Games will launch Fuse on May 28

Mobile news

• Clash of Clans mobile gamemaker Supercell is raising more than $100M at an $800M valuation
• Casual-game developer Big Fish celebrates 10 years and 2 billion downloads
• App marketing costs fall back to Earth after holiday highs
• Candy Crush Saga developer reveals two new Facebook games
• Fish Out Of Water! is the next mobile addiction from Fruit Ninja’s developers
• The future of mobile graphics: Better, faster, cheaper, & way more 3D
• Fetch wants to help smartphone users find games that they love
• Prepare your panzer: Wargaming is taking World of Tanks mobile
• App Annie reveals massive success for GungHo’s Puzzle & Dragons
• Verizon launches games portal using PlayPhone technology
• Joyride’s voice-activated mobile apps ‘turn cars into starships’
• Com2Us rides the Kakao mobile games wave and expands to the U.S.

Previews

• Ouya looks pretty but lacks killer games so far (preview)
• Space Hulk translates the board game to digital … with changes (preview)
• Infinite Crisis proves that superhuman brawls never get old (preview)
• Battlefield 4 goes for a human feel in the middle of its incredible carnage (preview)
• Divekick and Sportsfriends turn friends and strangers into rivals on the PlayStation 3 (preview)
• Everybody was kung-fu fighting: Age of Wushu comes to America (preview)

Reviews

• BioShock Infinite’s a fascinating ‘what if’ tale of American conservatism with a few flaws (review)
• The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct leaves you feeling empty (review)

Interviews

• Ahoy, transmedia! Warner Bros. sails into digital games (interview)
• Jade Raymond’s growing empire at Ubisoft (interview)
• David Ko sees mobile as critical for Zynga’s comeback in 2013 (interview)

Pieces of Flair

• 10 new Grand Theft Auto V screenshots (gallery)
• Battlefield 4: Check out the first screenshots
• BioShock Infinite guide: The best Vigors and Gear to make Columbia burn
• HarmoKnight: Finding the 5 ‘pinklefs’ and unlocking the secret world

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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This review contains minor spoilers.

Let’s get this out of the way: I think you should play BioShock Infinite.

The first-person shooter from developer Irrational Games (due out March 26 for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC) is one of the biggest releases of this console generation. In production for five years, Infinite has to live up to its predecessor’s pedigree and justify that half-decade of hype.

Does it live up to those expectations? Not entirely, but I don’t know what could. What it does do is entertain and enthrall.

Players take the role of Booker DeWitt, the rogue who is in too deep with loan sharks. DeWitt takes a job to rescue a girl from Columbia, a floating American city, to wipe away his debts.

If you played the original BioShock, you’ll recognize much of the structure that holds up Infinite. This is definitely a “BioShock.” The adventure starts as abruptly as the last. Once you’re in Columbia, the world confronts you with extreme social issues. You’ll have access to special powers called Vigors that stand in for the Plasmids from the 2007 release. DeWitt finds audio recordings that flesh out the world. It even has a lighthouse.

Irrational settled on a specific style, and Infinite is a riff on that. And it’s a riveting take on the concept. It plays so well, and the urge to uncover Columbia’s mysteries are so compelling, that I ripped through its dozen hours of gameplay in two sittings.

When it was over, I was satisfied but also a little confused and a touch disappointed, and while that wouldn’t hurt most other games, this one is so meticulously crafted that you can’t ignore even the tiniest cracks.

What You’ll Like

Elizabeth

Elizabeth is the aforementioned girl in need of rescuing. Well, “rescue” isn’t the right term. She really just needs a ride out of Columbia — otherwise, she can take care of herself.

You spend a good portion of Infinite accompanying this young, mysterious girl. Amazingly, not a single minute of that feels like an escort mission. Actually, it sometimes feels like she is escorting you.

Elizabeth never stands in a doorway, she’ll never harass you with banal banter, and she’ll never say something like “Can we get going?” If you want to stop and check every corner for cash and ammo, she’ll follow along and not just as some empty-headed A.I. assistant.

If you’re scavenging for items, she’ll go and lean against the wall — or occasionally, she’ll spot something and point it out to you. If you stop to look at a vending machine, she’ll take a seat at a nearby bench. If you pause to appreciate some art, she may walk up next to you and do the same. She’s a human with her own interests and motivations.

In combat, she serves two purposes. She finds extra ammo, items, and health and tosses it to DeWitt when he needs it most. She can also revive you when you lose all of your health.

Elizabeth also has trans-dimensional shifting powers that she can use to open existing portals to alternative realities. She can manifest powerful weapons, cover, or special platforms into your current reality using this ability. This gives the player another tool to use during combat.

I would consider Elizabeth a success if she simply never annoyed me, but her personality ensured that my relationship with her was about more than mere tolerance. All of Irrational’s tiny touches brought her to life, and I actually grew attached to her. Her routines are so systemically complex, the animation so precise, the voice acting so heartfelt that I will always remember BioShock Infinite as an adventure I shared with someone else.

Columbia is brilliantly realized

Irrational packed every square foot of Columbia with audio-visual information. The floating city is a dystopia of early 20th century Americana mixed with the white supremacy, anti-labor rhetoric and propaganda of the Jim Crow South and modern-day right-wing zealots.

In the way that the writings of Ayn Rand informed the world of BioShock, extremist conservatives like deceased Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina or current conservative icon, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, inform BioShock Infinite’s mythology.

Columbia is a floating fortress that has taken the founding of the United States and twisted it into a religion. The city’s citizens literally pray to Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson. It’s an extreme take on the unquestioning reverence for America that echoes some of the rhetoric you might hear from the right-wing of the Tea Party.

On Columbia, the “coloreds” and the Irish must use special bathrooms. A manufacturing magnate named Jeremiah Fink runs a labor city that has employees bidding on minutes’ worth of work. He’ll occasionally come on the loudspeaker to talk about how the lowly workers should be happy to avoid all the responsibilities of the white man.

One billboard shows a good little boy pointing his rifle at a horrifying caricature of a Jewish child. Another shows a white family under the words “Columbia Security: Protecting our faith, wealth, and racial purity.”

This kind of propaganda exists throughout Infinite, and you can’t help but stop and examine each one. Irrational’s artists did an amazing job capturing the grotesqueness of this type of racial imagery, and it transported me to something that I have only seen in history books and documentaries.

I also found myself compelled to explore every corner of the city in the possibility that I might stumble across some fresh bit of propaganda. Smartly, Irrational awards players who wander off the intended path. Nearly every dead-end has some kind of item, voice recording, or upgrade waiting for you.

It’s basic but clever design.

Columbia also feels expansive. You can’t enter every store and home, but it never gets claustrophobic. You can take multiple paths, and if one street is blocked off, it’s because that part of town floated away. It’s an elegant solution to invisible walls.

The use of music sets the tone and adds to the narrative

Aurally, BioShock Infinite is a next-gen game.

Columbia is full of brilliant musical cues. Songs come across the radio. Barbershop quartets spontaneously appear on an airship and begin serenading you with an astounding cover song.

Nothing makes BioShock Infinite feel more like a bid-budget product than its use of music.

It’s not just that the songs sound good or pop up so naturally. It’s that they contribute to the storytelling. One of the first songs you hear is a metaphor Infinite. Another anachronistic tune helps flesh out the setting. The singing crowd helps guide you to where you need to go.

The combat is exciting and keeps the game moving at rapid pace

If the imagery and the music were constantly pushing me forward, the combat holds the varying sections together.

Shooting and using Vigors is a blast in two- to eight-minute chunks. One of the only battles that lasts longer than that gives you a unique and amazing ability near the end of the campaign.

The skyline mechanic, a roller-coaster like rail system that DeWitt can travel on by hanging from his special hook, also mixes up combat.

Personally, I had more fun exploring the world, but that’s not because the combat is lacking. Irrational uses fights to break up areas, and in that way it keeps the game’s pacing in check.

I had a difficult time putting down the controller because I was always one more fight or one more area away from the next discovery.

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Robert Kirkman has a twisted mind. Somewhere in the dark recesses of his psyche lurked tales of hacking off limbs, gouging of eyes with spoons, and pinning down male genitalia with nails. And this doesn’t even have anything to do with what the zombies do. He just has to let all that shit out. That’s the only explanation I can think of for The Walking Dead, the writer’s ongoing black-and-white comic book story that has expanded its reach to television and video games.

The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct (out now for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii U, and PC) isn’t your typical first-person zombie-shootin’ game since you can’t mow down the undead with a generous supply of bullets. It takes place in the early days of the zombie apocalypse from AMC’s version of The Walking Dead — the popular TV series based on the comic — and puts you in the role of Daryl Dixon, the show’s crossbow-firing antihero.

In keeping with the fiction’s rules, gunshots and explosions attract way more zombies (via sight and sound) than those they actually kill, so it’s best to stick with melee weapons and close encounters to ensure Daryl’s safety as he fights through Georgia in search of his older brother, Merle. Developer Terminal Reality wisely emphasizes a survival aspect that zombie-focused games usually ignore, but it’s not enough to elevate Survival Instinct (as played on a PS3) from being more than just a mediocre experience.

What you’ll like

Struggling to survive

Unlike the undead shooting gallery seen in Left 4 Dead or Call of Duty: Black Ops II’s outlandish zombie mode, Survival Instinct has a distinctive gameplay loop of exploration, scavenging, and hunting down walkers (The Walking Dead’s parlance for zombies). It all comes together really well in the first few hours — you need to look for gas cans so you have enough fuel to travel from town to town; you explore that area for food, munitions, and possible survivors to bring with you; and when you’re done there, you drive over to the next place and repeat the process.

Zombies aren’t just cannon fodder since it only takes a handful of them to kill you. The best strategy is to break them up into smaller groups or isolate them individually, and then sneak behind and smash or stab their heads with weapons like a baseball bat or a machete. It’s impossible to account for every single corpse roaming around, so I always felt nervous when exploring an infested town. But it’s all the more thrilling when you do manage to outsmart them by picking them off or when you successfully hide from a huge herd that’s coming after you.

The road is fraught with danger as well. The chances of your car breaking down or finding a pit stop to search for supplies depends on which of the three routes you take. Driving down the back roads use up a lot of fuel, but you’ll pull over more often for supply runs. Regular streets take up a little less gas and gives you a medium chance to find new areas. And highways need the least amount of fuel, but you’ll also have a high probability that your car will stall.

The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct screenshots

Grounding this risk/rewards system in some sense of realism makes your experience unpredictable. I thought I was doing well when I had a surplus of food and guns … but the next area I traveled through (and the herd of zombies I met) nearly drained me of all of my resources.

It’s a solid system that would’ve worked well with better level designs and mission objectives. But repetition began to set in halfway through my 8.5 hour playthrough thanks to a bunch of problems, which more development time could have fixed.

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Luigi has the worst luck imaginable. Twelve years after he escaped from a ghost-filled mansion, he finds himself stuck in a fog-covered valley full of haunted houses! To make things worse, all the spirits in the area are way more aggressive than they’ve ever been, and only Luigi can locate the five shattered pieces of the magical Dark Moon that keeps them at bay. Well, the odd Professor E. Gadd insists Luigi is the only one who can help, anyway.

Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon is the first Luigi-centric game since the original came out on the GameCube in 2001. It carries on some of the best aspects of its predecessor while dedicating itself to more puzzle-driven level design and far fewer references to the Super Mario Bros. Mushroom Kingdom. The writing is just as irreverently clever, and the world so much more personalized for Luigi, that Dark Moon feels more like a fresh take on the franchise and not a sequel to the first game.

While Dark Moon definitely succeeds in setting itself apart from the original Luigi’s Mansion, its gameplay cries out for a dual-analog control scheme that it sadly doesn’t get on the 3DS. The result is a sometimes frustrating ghost-hunting experience made more complicated if you try to play with 3D enabled.

What you’ll like

All about Luigi

Even though Dark Moon is the second Luigi’s Mansion, it is the first where the protagonist really feels like he’s standing on his own. This time, Luigi isn’t searching for Mario, he isn’t constantly bombarded with poison mushrooms, and he’s practically kidnapped by E. Gadd to fight ghosts. Terrified and mostly alone, he sets out to pacify a entire valley full of haunted houses.

It’s wonderful seeing Luigi fall so easily into a storyline that doesn’t need Mario or Princess Peach to motivate it. In Dark Moon, Luigi is fighting for himself and has to power through his fear of ghosts to succeed. While trying to save himself, he’s also inadvertently saving the world from aggressive spirits, so he still ends up a hero.

Puzzle-solving

Ghosts sure do like to make things complicated for Luigi as he searches for pieces of the shattered Dark Moon. You’ll have to search every rug, painting, and web-covered ball to make your way through the five spooky locations in the game. You learn puzzle mechanics through simple, straightforward scenarios, but solving later puzzles requires you to remember every sneaky solution you’ve ever discovered in order to progress.

Because of that, Dark Moon is a satisfying brainteaser that pushes you to try crazy combinations in the hope that maybe setting a stretchy piece of spiderweb over to an open flame just might clear the path. The game won’t penalize you for trying, so why not run with it?

Streamlined ghost-busting

The original Luigi’s Mansion had a lot of great ideas, but it suffered from trying to merge too many elements at once. Dark Moon takes the best concepts from the first game (like vacuum-based ghost trapping and oodles of hidden money) and sprinkles in better weapons and tools. Luigi now has the Poltergust 5000 at his disposal, an even stronger capture unit that can find objects ghosts that are trying to hide and delicately pluck cobwebs off suits of armor.

Luigi no longer has to worry about mushrooms slowing him down. Dark Moon puts more emphasis on skillfully dodging ghosts and timing your attacks than limiting Luigi’s power to fight back.

Dark Moon also supports local and online multiplayer. Now you can play through several ghost-busting challenges in the “Scare Scraper” with your friends, like fighting floor after floor of baddies or running around trying to find hidden ghost dogs. Setting up multiplayer matches is relatively easy, but you’ll need to play through part of the first mansion before you can use it.

What you won’t like

Tilt aiming and uncomfortable controls 

Nothing pairs better with a touchy 3D screen like tilt controls, am I right? You don’t have to move your 3DS to aim Luigi’s Poltergust 5000, but you’ll definitely want to after trying to trying to look up and down with the X and B buttons while holding down the right bumper to suck in ghosts. Dark Moon is simply begging for Circle Pad Pro support, something Nintendo did not include. It’s not like that would have helped me anyway; I played this game on a 3DS XL.

You cannot turn off the tilt action, nor can you remap the 3DS buttons to make combat less painful.

Claustrophobic combat

Dark Moon means well by putting more emphasis on player skill than restricting Luigi through status-effect items, but levels sometimes feel too cluttered or too precariously constructed for you to avoid ghost attacks efficiently. Since the game rates your level performance based on how much damage you take as you fight, the tricky combat often leaves you very wounded as you fumble with the Poltergust.

While I like that many of the boss fights in Dark Moon require you to think on your feet and solve puzzles while you’re avoiding obstacles, it is incredibly frustrating to find yourself stuck in a corner or pinned by a fallen piece of flooring thanks to the limited screen real estate on the 3DS. Much of the claustrophobic feeling definitely comes from the fact that level designs are much smaller in scope than the original game thanks to hardware limitations.

It’s still very playable, but you are frustratingly aware that you’re playing a handheld sequel to a console game. I think canning the 3DS idea and moving Dark Moon to Wii U would have addressed practically all my complaints.

Conclusion

Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon is a puzzle-rich wonderland full of irreverent humor and clever level design, but it cannot overcome the 3DS’s limitations. Tilt controls and the lack of a second analog stick really tarnishes an otherwise amazing game. I really, truly wanted to love Dark Moon unconditionally as it freshens up the Luigi’s Mansion concept and depicts its protagonist as truly acting on his own for the first time, but playing it is extremely frustrating at times.

Dark Moon is still incredibly fun, but you have to approach it realizing that the controls aren’t what they should be. I’d almost take aiming the Poltergust with the stylus over the awkward way Nintendo implemented aiming here, but that would make the game just as unwieldy as Kid Icarus: Uprising’s use of the touchscreen for movement. Uprising’s biggest problem, though, was that it did support the extra circle pad but only to change which thumb used the 3DS’ built-in analog nub.

What saves Luigi’s Mansion is that it isn’t Kid Icarus: Uprising, but it’s still a bit disappointing.

Score: 80/100

Luigi’s Mansion is a 3DS exclusive that released on March 24, 2013. Nintendo provided an eShop code for this review. 

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