Although this Forza is unlike any Forza you’ve played before, it will feel familiar to anyone who’s played Smuggler’s Run, Fuel, Test Drive Unlimited 2, Midnight Club: Los Angeles, Burnout Paradise, or Driver. Basically, there’s a lot of driving between the driving. How do you do this without making it feel like a commute? Forza Horizon mostly handles this adroitly. It’s a laidback road trip with lots of road running through lots of scenery. Kick back and drive.
But if you’re looking for a well-made open world, you’ve taken a wrong turn into the sort of festive racing fest you’d find in an EA game or one of Codemaster’s latest games. You play yet another mute character racing against a bunch of trash talking douchebags, but this time you wear the world’s ugliest watch. What, you don’t drive from the cockpit view? Given that timepiece, I can’t say I blame you.
After the jump, where would you like to go today? I hope you said Colorado. Continue reading →
A lot has changed on the virtual battlefields of World of Tanks in the 18 months since Dave Markell’s excellent series of articles. The matchmaker has been improved. Many new tanks have been added, including French and British tanks and tier X medium tanks and tank destroyers. The roster of available maps has grown significantly. Two new game modes have been added. The graphics have been improved through the use of a new renderer. And a new physics engine has radically changed the gameplay on certain maps.
But to those who are quick to dismiss freemium games, the biggest change is still to come: In the upcoming Version 8.1 update to World of Tanks (currently available on the public test server) premium “gold” ammunition (purchasable only with real-life money) will also become purchasable through the in-game “silver” currency. With a stroke, Wargaming.net has eliminated your excuse for refusing to try the game!
After the jump, your new excuses for not trying the game! Continue reading →
Painkiller: Hell & Damnation is an uncanny Unreal 3 remix of the original Painkiller, which is my favorite Doom game of all time. It’s every bit as good as it was in 2004. Actually, better. I forgot how awesome it is to play a shooter that doesn’t need a reload key. And this time it’s got co-op support. If there’s one thing better than replaying Painkiller, it’s replaying Painkiller cooperatively.
Cargo Commander is an indie space dungeon exploration game. Think of it as a sci-fi Rogue-like with unique space-based qualities and the catchiest space honky-tonk aesthetic this side of Starcraft 1. Here’s how it plays.
The last few Assassin’s Creeds are kind of a blur for me. Kind of like they were a blur for the folks who made them. Zing! So I had very little enthusiasm going into Assassin’s Creed III. After playing for a while, I still had very little enthusiasm. Assassin’s Creed III starts slow, despite an interesting idea for how to do a prologue. It’s ponderous and familiar. It features way too much Desmond (at this point, any Desmond is way too much Desmond). For those of us burned out after a few years of cavorting around cities that weren’t as good as Venice, Assassin’s Creed III feels like just another Assassin’s Creed, but with dishwater dull Colonial architecture. Here we go again. But then you get past the first five or six hours and, holy cats, the Assassin’s Creed series is good again! At this point, I couldn’t be happier with how this is turning out. Consider your wallet imperiled.
After an extensive beta period, Natural Selection 2 finally goes live this week. This team-based aliens vs marines multiplayer shooter/strategy hybrid has a following from the first game for a reason. And lest you worry what you’re getting into, this is no free-to-play grindfest. It’s a straight-up, two-asymmetrical-but-equal-teams-against-each-other, reset-to-zero-when-you’re-done complete package.
And speaking of team-based multiplayer shooters with a twist, Guns of Icarus launches this week. This release doesn’t yet include an intended adventure mode where your airships fly around trade routes to make money and buy upgrades. Instead, it’s an airship vs airship skirmish game in which players crew the airships. Considering the dearth of airship deathmatches since Flying Heroes, I’ll take what I can get.
Electronic Arts releases Need for Speed: Most Wanted. No telling how long the servers will be up, so hurry up and race before it’s sunsetted!
Marvel Avengers: Battle for Earth is some sort of Kinect fighting game that poses the question “who would win in a fight between Spiderman and Wolverine?”. The correct answer is “Spiderman and Woverine aren’t Avengers”. I also would have accepted, “I’ve already played Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and I didn’t need a Kinect to do it”.
Cloud Atlas leaves us variously nonplussed, in love, and appropriately whelmed. To skip spoilers, jump through time to the 55-minute mark for this week’s 3×3. We bring you our horror triple features just in time for Halloween.
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