XBOX 360

The First Big Bomb Of The Summer Inversion is not a good game. On a good day, it might be a passable game, if you’re in a forgiving, patient, pitiable sort of mood, but if you’re the sort of person that is looking to have your $60 entertain you, rather than bore you or make you angry, you might want to spend that money elsewhere. As we...

What do you get when you mix together equal parts rainbows and zombies, throw in a cup of rock and roll, boil until sweet, then serve sprinkled with the warped sense of humor of Suda51? Chances are you'll get the latest game from Warner Bros. Interactive and Grasshopper Manufacture, Lollipop Chainsaw. It sounds like an odd recipe but it does taste awfully good. In Lollipop Chainsaw you play as...

At first glance, Mad Riders serves up a delectable mixture of over-the-top tricks, plenty of bonkers race tracks, and high-octane thrills -- the type you look for in bigger-budget releases, not typically Xbox Live Arcade titles. When you get your hands dirty, the illusion is quick to fade. Techland's madcap racer is a cheap thrill ride, but it's niceties come at the cost of some awkward design decisions. ...

Fire The Dungeon Master Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale just reinforces to me that the company that owns this intellectual property, Wizards of the Coast, made a terrible, terrible mistake when they let BioWare stop making games for their IP. Daggerdale is an action RPG that tries to bring a little bit of that BioWare/Blizzard feel, and stumbles—almost fatally—in just about every department. Generic Dungeon Adventure...

Game of Thrones, the latest videogame version of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, attempts to do everything right. Its developers, Cyanide, take into account the wild success of the televised adaptation and the story’s ability to obliterate generations of fantasy tropes with its cynical view of morality, “righteous” warfare and, even, truth. The designers’ attempt to bring Martin’s complex politicking and multifaceted character creation into...

Although I’ve never been the biggest fan of Sonic the Hedgehog, I have generally enjoyed the various Sonic games that have been released throughout the years. I absolutely loved the precursor to this game, Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode I, as it was a nice throwback to the original Sonic games, but with updated HD graphics, refined controls and a new mechanic to update the character’s moves. ...

It’s been years since we’ve seen the grizzled sharpshooting detective Max Payne. In his long awaited return in, glorious HD much has changed, but much has stayed the same. The series was one of the first to incorporate cinematic storytelling into video games and that is a continued focus here, now taking influence from a wider array of movies to reflect a new era. In previous generations, the game...

Crazy Japanese Shmup Is Crazy The only Westerm fans of Japanese gaming that have it worse than the JRPG lovers are the shoot ‘em up, or shmup, or “bullet hell” fans. This is one genre that has NOT fared well outside of Japan as gamers flock to the much more popular first person shooter. Blame it on skill levels going down, or tastes changing where Western gamers...

A Long Time Coming Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Future Soldier (GRFS) was first announced to be in development way back in January of 2009 and over the past few years has had many “projected” release dates. As those dates came and went and the release was pushed back time and time again, many people thought that this latest addition to the Ghost Recon series would never see...

When I first saw a trailer for Awesomenauts, I thought it looked like a fun new game, in the vein of the recent Shoot Many Robots, with customizable characters with different assortments of weapons, fighting it out online against myriad opponents. Not everything in that statement is incorrect, but the most notable part is that this is NOT a fun game, it’s instead a very frustrating one, which...

No Longer Prototypical Prototype first came on the scene in 2009 and went head-to-head with inFamous for the crown of “super-hero-open-world-sandbox-game.” It was a fight that it ultimately lost. Fast forward three years later, and now Prototype 2 craters onto the scene all by itself, with a new hero and enough angst to choke even a hormonally starved Twilight fan. It’s also had the benefit of seeing...

Trials Evolution is fantastic example of classic gaming meeting new. At first glance, you'll be reminded of ExciteBike. But where that renowned mainstay of gaming left off, RedLynx picks up. Trials differs substantially from ExciteBike and similar titles in that you cannot steer to the left or to the right. The only direction you can go is straight ahead – pedal-to-the-metal, baby! Straight forward is the key to victory....

Robert Kirkman Is A Proud ManWhen it comes to translating a comic into a game, most properties have had a bad time of it. In recent years, there have been only two IPs that have made the transition with great success. Rocksteady’s Batman series, and The Darkness as stewarded by first Starbreeze, and now Digital Extremes. We can now add a third name to that list, as Robert Kirkman’s...

The Sword. The Guns. The Trench Coat.There was time when the name Dante was neither confused with a badly executed game based on classic literature, nor was it referred to with a fearful shudder of apprehension because of a possible, badly misdirected reboot. There was a time when you mentioned the name Dante to gamers, and they immediately thought of a cocky, white haired, gun shootin’, sword swingin’ devil...

Whither Goest Thou, Reiko?Once again, there is racing going on, though with a noticeable lack of ridges (at least in the beginning) and the conspicuous absence of everyone’s favorite vacuous yet pretty girl-mascot, Reiko Nagase. Still, Namco is calling this a Ridge Racer game, despite the fact that it’s not even developed in-house anymore, but instead created by the Finnish studio, Bugbear Entertainment. What do you get when you...

Strap yourself in and feel the need, the need for speed in Top Gun: Hard Lock, a new game based on the hit 1986 film from Paramount Pictures. In this aerial combat action game from developer Headstrong games, you will face wave after wave of Russian MiG fighters as you turn and burn through 15 missions or take the dogfight online with up to 15 other players. Featuring fully...

Geralt of Rivia makes his way on to the Xbox 360 in the Witcher 2: Enhanced Edition. Bringing the hit action-RPG to the consoles with some tweaks to help out the console gamers. The Enhanced Edition adds several new hours of gameplay to the game. There are some new areas introduced as well as new characters. Both of these add more depth and background to the already...

The Xbox Live Arcade has diversified its offering of casual puzzlers since its inception, adding everything from sudoku, chess, card games, and the bizarre yet wholly addictive budget titles that can’t really be categorized. That’s where The Splatters fits in. It’s a colorful, wacky time that takes some obvious cues from a menagerie of iOS games and puts a new spin on them. If you’ve ever wanted to take...

Hard Core Armor It should come as no surprise to anyone that Armored Core V, by From Software, is not an easy game. After all, the Japanese studio has made quite a name for themselves recently with the masochist’s dreams known as Demons Souls and Dark Souls. From Software is a company that prides itself on deep gameplay that demands players don’t just play a game, they...

I shot a lot of robots. I did it by myself, I did it with friends and I did it with strangers. Each time I did it, it felt good. Whether they came in pairs or in massive waves, I shot them down with increasingly powerful weapons while wearing increasingly ridiculous clothes. The fact that many of the places I shot robots in looked very similar to one another...