Grand Theft Auto IV

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Deadly Premonition

Vanquish

4x4 Evolution

The Orange Box

Mafia II (Digital Deluxe Edition)

2002 FIFA World Cup

Metro 2033

Crysis 2

Billion dollar hide.

That Crysis 2 is a technical marvel is no surprise. Its breeding is strong, its genetics sound. Beauty, in the form of the new CryEngine3, comes easily. Yet what is surprising is just how good it looks on a console power... Read Full Review

Homefront

Homefront lacks both the pizazz and polish of bigger shooters.

"Press A to skip." And so begins Homefront's single-player campaign. A montage sets the scene of this dystopian future and with North Korea's rise and America's struggling economy, serious things are afoot. Yet alongs... Read Full Review

Red Seeds Profile

This is a story that rewards your patience and input. Appropriate then, considering you and York are inextricably linked

It's generally accepted that in reviewing something, one needs to be objective. After all, objectivity is the surest base for criticism, a foothold that allows one to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of a game and r... Read Full Review

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II

In a year beholden to console gaming's finest offerings, The Force Unleashed II is impossible to recommend

Dual lightsabers, disposable stormtroopers and an ominous overture: welcome to The Force Unleashed II or, the return of Starkiller, Calvin Klein jaw and shorn hair intact. While the developers do their best to justify th... Read Full Review

Vanquish

As the adage goes, the star that burns most bright is the star that dies twice as fast.

Shoddy name aside, Vanquish is extraordinary. You merely have to glance at the skybox that hangs over the action to appreciate the creativity underlying this game. The colonial planet of Providence shuns a traditional li... Read Full Review

FIFA 11

Unpredictability abounds in the finest FIFA offering to date.

As I write this, Liverpool sits atop the Barclays Premier League log with seven wins out of seven games. Torres is in fine form, the team has gelled and even the manager is garnering praise. It should be noted, of course... Read Full Review

Grim Fandango

A dance with the dead.

The beauty of the afterlife is that we have no way of knowing whether it exists, what it's like and whether it's worth seeing. Grim Fandango's version is the Land of the Dead, a world of art deco styling with a heavy sen... Read Full Review

Dead Rising 2

Green and greed once ruled in Fortune City.

Irreverent, unabashed and with its tongue firmly in its cheek, Dead Rising 2 honours the principles that framed its predecessor. In today's money-conscious world, Dead Rising 2 flips the ordinary into the truly extraordi... Read Full Review

MorphX

Sparks of genuine and surprising creativity make MorphX worthy of a rental.

You get the feeling that developers Buka and Targem don't think much of their newest creation. MorphX has slipped onto store shelves without as much as a whimper, cowering beneath the likes of Dead Rising 2 and Halo: Rea... Read Full Review

Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne

Max is as suave as ever.

Max smiles grimly. The grunts in the adjourning room are oblivious to his presence. Only seconds earlier he had dived in with marked aplomb, relying on his trusty slow-mo, "bullet time" moves to get one up on the potenti... Read Full Review

Mafia II

Mafia II is not Grand Theft Auto in frilly 1950s frock.

Two things about Mafia II you can be absolutely sure. It's not Grand Theft Auto (GTA) in frilly 1950s frock, and it has fifty Playboy centerfolds to find: the best incentive for hunting down collectibles ever. Vito Scale... Read Full Review

The Orange Box

Despite having five games housed under one roof, The Orange Box is very much about quality rather than quantity.

It's night-on impossible to mark The Orange Box down. Boasting Valve's magnum opus and its episodic follow-ups, you already have a harmony of supreme first-person shooters. And that's before you factor in the gravity-def... Read Full Review

Half-Life 2: Episode One

Episode One's truncated nature and paucity of variety undersells what should have been a vastly superior game.

Written with the recently digested Episode Two in mind, it's glaringly apparent how lackluster Half-Life 2: Episode One really is. Originally titled Aftermath, it depicts the repercussions of the Citadel's explosion, Tho... Read Full Review

American McGee Presents Bad Day LA

American McGee's inability to make Bad Day LA fun masks over any satirical messages he may have wished to convey.

What is Bad Day LA? Is it a blithe GTA? Or is it a shameless attempt at satirical hilarity that fails on all accounts? The latter, I’d say. American McGee’s latest stab at video-gaming is a tremendous waste of his quirky... Read Full Review

Halo 3

Hardly the rip-roaring denouement to a wildly popular series, Halo 3 pales remarkably in the face of other shooters.

I do hate starting reviews with a cliché skewer of insight. In Halo 3’s case it’s impossible to avoid – such was the heavy hype placed on this trilogy-completing shooter that expectations (mine included) were exce... Read Full Review

Boiling Point

Boiling Point will make your blood boil, but ultimately, salvation is at hand.

Broken, yet addictive. Released for the PC in 2005, Boiling Point appeals to my inner masochist, my desire to be annoyed, frustrated, yet strangely drawn back. Rarely has a game done so much wrong and yet still been so e... Read Full Review

Burnout Paradise

While the heart-attack prone should steer clear, anyone with a pulse will devour Burnout Paradise eagerly.

Burnout Paradise is a visual treat. It's an assault on the human senses. Boring? No. Timid? Not a chance. Humdrum? Far from it. Of course, if a game relies on one mechanic too heavily, it's said to be staid. If a game re... Read Full Review

Grand Theft Auto IV

Rockstar has ensured that no element of GTA 4 has gone half-baked. Resultantly, this is a slimmer, superior experience.

Although Sandbox games are appreciated for their variety, it's often this exercise in diversity that proves their downfall. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas offered equal chunks of shooting and driving with the odd lithe-st... Read Full Review

The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena

While the 2004 classic, Butcher Bay, is still as good as ever, it's brought down by the uninspired sequel.

Oh how I love compilations. Two games for the price of one! What could be better? Well, three, or in the case of The Orange Box, five, but Starbreeze hasn't been ungenerous either and when you buy The Chronicles of Riddi... Read Full Review

Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City

It's grunge versus disco balls in the tale of two halves; one average, the other superb.

Faith: that's what I have in Rockstar. Having spent years filching cars, mowing down pedestrians and evading cops, I'm well acquainted with the dubious morals of Rockstar's GTA series. I'm also well in tune with its incr... Read Full Review

Metro 2033

Woeful gunplay and design mishaps mar what should have been a much better game.

Metro 2033. It's like meeting a girl online (not that I'd ever do such a thing), seeing her photos, reading her interests and thinking she's the one. The perfect specimen. And then you meet her. And it's a him. With a un... Read Full Review

Alan Wake

Whether Alan Wake took five years or six, nine years or ten, it's still a superb action game that shouldn't be missed.

Much has been made of Alan Wake's protracted time in development. We first got a whiff of this psychological thriller back in 2005, but it was envisaged as a sandbox-style game then. Five years later and much has changed... Read Full Review

Forza Motorsport 3

The singleplayer campaign is stale, but the rest of the game succeeds admirably.

With the advances in videogame technology, the antiquated thrills and spills of 1990s arcade racing games no longer satiate gamers. We've moved on; we now seek realism and a roster of cars that would make Jay Leno blush... Read Full Review

Resident Evil 5

Resident Evil 5 borders all-out action and survival horror, but never gets either quite right.

With the line between games and films becoming increasingly blurred, it's fitting that Resident Evil 5 has arrived; a loud, brash spokesperson for the big-budget merits of gaming, with guns aplenty, plenty of gore and su... Read Full Review

Gears of War

Far more than a technical showpiece, Gear's cover-centric gunfights successfully redefine the genre's parameters.

Gears of War was the first Xbox 360 game I played – what an introduction to console gaming it proved to be. Oozing style and visual opulence, it belies the Xbox's mere 512 megabytes of RAM. It's more than a technical sho... Read Full Review