Forget simple pylons, the reality of StarCraft II is that you must construct additional everything. My gaggle of Mauraders was my pride and joy until I looked up and saw the sun blotted out by a Mutalisk swarm. GG, f10, surrender. I even thought I was doing a pretty good job, up until the game told me I was performing a terrible 83 actions a minute in the post-match report.

I’m ashamed of myself and you, the reader, probably pity me. StarCraft fans still without access to the beta are probably fuming: “how did he, someone who is rubbish and a bit fat, get to play this game early when I was left out in the cold?” The answer is luck, mostly, alongside the fact StarCraft II is so daunting every other member of our staff was too afraid to have a go. That’s the kind of game it is.

Blizzard’s taut dedication to difficulty is impressive, and whilst other developers seem to be going out of their way to simplify every conceivable facet of the RTS genre it’s refreshing, admirable but still somewhat fear-inducing to see Blizzard proudly declare their game has been built from the ground up for the competitive eSports crowd. It’s serious business, for serious gamers, and it elicits such dedication that peripheral designers will release keyboards and mice specifically tailored to StarCraft II. People who just nip into their games for six hours and then move on need not apply.

Continue Reading @ play.tm

Sam “Serious” Stone knows how life is: the only good headless kamikaze Sirian cyborg is a dead headless kamikaze Sirian cyborg.

If you’re looking for subtlety, you won’t find it here. Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter is a self-consciously bombastic game, and one concentrating so hard to channel the spirit of DOOM it probably forgot what it was originally supposed to be doing and accidentally ended up in 2010.

In all honestly, most people probably didn’t play Serious Sam SD: The Second Encounter when it was first released in 2002, so this new bump-mapped redux will arrive without a healthy dose of historical context. That’s fine: those things on the screen? Shoot them.

But even scarier is the thought of today’s youth being so young they’ve probably not even played DOOM, the spiffing game Serious Sam modelled itself on. The closest these children have come to id’s seminal 1993 classic is through the occasional appearance of it on dodgy 90s movies, back when everyone had flat tops and mobile phones the size of lampshades. This game’s target audience is probably people that were too young to legally play Serious Sam in the early noughties, but did anyway, and are now well into their twenties.

Continue reading @ play.tm

If Modern Warfare 2′s in-game player monitor is any indicator, Infinity Ward has already succeeded with the Stimulus Package: hundreds of thousands of people are currently playing, above and beyond the kind of numbers most developers would be happy to drown a sack of adorable puppies to achieve. Even after a quarter of a year, the world’s most successful videogame is still staggeringly popular.

Continue reading @ play.tm

It opens with the boys back in town. Avitus, the intolerant heavy weapons guy, is entrenched within a bunker behind an all important command point. Cyrus, the philosophical scout, is cloaked and waiting in the wings. Tarkus, the grisly battle-hardened veteran, occupies an adjacent building. The reason: swarms of traitorous Imperial Guard are rushing the makeshift defence, streams of machine gun fire relentlessly rattle on your position and all available cover has been crushed underneath the weighty boots of the mutinous heretics. Even the ground is being charred in the attack. Where is your character, the Force Commander, in this madness? Going toe-to-toe with the hundreds-strong rush. And winning.

Continue reading @ play.tm

Command & Conquer 4 still knows how to pile on the schlock. We’re now up to 2077, thirty years after the third game, so all your units are either vehicles or people in chunky robot suits because it’s the future – though the Mammoth Tank is still going strong. You, the conquering commander, once were blind but now you see, as experimental (futuristic) eye surgery allows your visually-challenged character to return to the fray, though in typical C&C fashion it’s from a mute first-person perspective. It becomes quickly apparent that your optical implants, other than having a totally sweet TV tuner built-in that can broadcast the news straight into your head, are the integral part of Kane’s latest mysterious master plan.

Continue reading @ play.tm

A few hours into Napoleon: Total war, I realised that – across almost fifteen years of empire building strategy games – I’ve never played a single campaign, in any game, as the French.

Continue reading @ play.tm

What’s Serious Sam like in HD? Well, it’s like Serious Sam. It plays exactly, and unapologetically, like the 2001 original. Croatian developers Croteam are confident that this, along with the engine’s new jinglier bells and noisier whistles, is enough to tempt you to spend the best part of twenty quid. They also wouldn’t mind if you forgot that the alternative is rooting around a second-hand bargain bin and picking up a dusty old copy of the eight-year-old original for fifty pence.

Continue reading @ play.tm

You only need to peek at EA’s immense marketing spend for Left 4 Dead 2 to see what all the fuss is about. Last year’s affair was comparatively muted, spurred along by word of mouth, adulation from the gaming press and a communal respect for Valve’s pedigree as a developer. Left 4 Dead 2 begins with the success of the original, creating a sequel born out of dedication, a shrewd understanding of the online market and the realisation that the first one of these was pretty dang good.

Continue reading @ play.tm

Dragon Age is big. Really big. Over fifty hours big, and that’s if you skip tons of side quests. Then your eye creeps over to the suffix: Origins. BioWare’s latest unashamed fantasy epic, which once again pits you against impossible odds to decide the fate of the entire world, is – sales and reception permitting, I imagine – the equivalent of dipping your foot in the pool to test the waters.

Continue reading @ play.tm

The Zone is a hostile place. If it’s not the mutants, bandits or aggressive weather conditions putting an end to the player’s expedition around Chernobyl nuclear power plant, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.’s unoptimised, uncompromising engine will routinely throw its own spanner in the works and spectacularly crash to desktop.

Continue reading @ play.tm