Though the Assassin’s Creed series has seen its share of highs from its inauspicious debut in 2007 to the soaring highs of the Ezio trilogy, it hit an all-time low with the miserable face-plant that was Assassin’s Creed III. No doubt suffering from the apparent annualization of the franchise, Assassin’s Creed III got almost everything wrong. As such, the announcement of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag didn’t inspire much confidence in 2013. Combining the stealth and parkour-heavy gameplay the series was built on with island-hopping and naval combat in the salty seas of the Caribbean shouldn’t have made any sense; however, against all odds, it did, leading to perhaps the best game the series has delivered so far.

Continue reading →

Few things get the gaming world interested quite like a free game on a console. Unlike on the PC, where free games are given away constantly, there’s an allure of quality (whether earned or not) to a full game available for free to download onto a console. Surely the makers of the console wouldn’t offer a new game for free that was broken or unfinished. Right? Well, Xbox challenges this notion with #IDARB, a.k.a. It Draws a Red Box. In the right hands, its unique concept could have helped it become one of Games With Gold’s more memorable titles. Unfortunately, in the hands of the developer Other Ocean, this game is an all-but-unfinished broken mess.

Continue reading →

Gaming’s preeminent weirdo, Swery65, made the leap from cult video game director to full-blown phenomenon with the 2010 release of Deadly Premonition – a horror game that scared almost nobody, but managed to form an almost beautiful train-wreck of oddball ideas and storylines that still generates acclaim and controversy to this day. The newest game from Swery (a.k.a. Hidetaka Suehiro), and his first as sole writer and director since Deadly Premonition, is D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die, a title that lives up to his notorious level of weird. D4 is episode-based, and as such only two full episodes have been released, so it’s tough to judge the game considering it doesn’t have an ending yet. It’s even tougher to say whether an ending is coming at all – D4 didn’t sell all that well upon release in late 2014, but a recent give-away as an Xbox “Games with Gold” and a port to PC may have renewed enough interest to get the rest of this game made.  Even with a lack of clear-cut ending, it’s hard to imagine any of Swery65’s fans being disappointed with D4, although the general public looking for a more traditional gameplay experience may find it a tedious chore.

Continue reading →

Ubisoft has been releasing games for nearly 25 years, and yet it took until 2014 for the developer to release its first ever full-fledged RPG, the downloadable title Child of Light. For their first foray into the genre, Ubisoft ended up reusing the Rayman engine and managed to build a simple and short role-playing game around it. This is the most unique twist on the formula Ubisoft provides, ditching the top-down perspective used by almost every single 2D RPG in existence in favor of an open-world side-scroller, and while the presentation here is phenomenal, there just isn’t enough depth to the gameplay and story to give Child of Light a strong recommendation.

Continue reading →

The field of first-person shooters is extremely competitive and overcrowded these days, with new intellectual properties showing up seemingly every month and established juggernauts like Halo, Call of Duty, and Borderlands constantly churning out new installments that sell in droves. The Battlefield series has long played second fiddle to the Call of Duty series as a straight military shooter, so it makes sense that developer Electronic Arts was willing to hand the series over to a new developer, Visceral Games, and let them take the series in a completely different direction to stake out its own territory. Battlefield Hardline is that new direction, a game that trades traditional warzones for the more small-scale war on drugs in Miami. There’s less of a focus on big-budget action sequences and cut-scenes, and more emphasis on stealth, gathering evidence, and peacefully getting suspects to surrender, while still retaining the core first-person shooter gameplay that made the series famous. Unfortunately, while these new ideas mostly work well, a half-baked story and Visceral’s inability to fully commit to the small-scale joys of a police simulator keep the game from realizing its true potential.

Continue reading →