The Clone Wars board is based on the CG animated series currently running on cable. There is a 3D character model of Anakin on the left ramp of the board and if you work hard enough his apprentice joins on the right ramp. The board is laid out well and it is quite easy to rack up a good score. The artwork on this board is actually better quality than Zen’s Classic boards.

The Boba Fett board is obviously based on Boba Fett, the bounty hunter sent by Jabba the Hutt to track down Han Solo. A 3D character model of Boba Fett stands on the right ramp, and as you keep working he flies to the left ramp and back. Although pretty cool, it is actually pretty distracting. Overall I found the layout to not work as well as the other boards. You have an extra flipper on the left side that is angled in such a way that it is quite easy to shoot the ball straight across to the other side of the board, and directly into the gutter. Although the artwork is also well done, down to a Han Solo in carbonite spinner, the board is a little harder to read. I was surprised to find that despite it being hard to understand how I needed to score, my highest scores came off the Boba Fett board.

The Episode V: Empire Strikes back was the best of the three. The board is laid out with more 3D models, include Darth Vader. With the board being more open, it is easier to read and so hitting objectives are more comprehensive. The highlight is when you unlock the scenes. There are 6 different scenes to choose from, all the way from landing the Millennium Falcon, to attacking 3D storm troopers. There are a few traditional metal ramps, but on the far left side is Luke Skywalker’s first lightsaber, that emits a blue beam as it becomes a ramp. Since it is an easier board to read and understand, I played this board more, even though I scored higher on the other boards.

There are only a few minor issues to these boards. The biggest issue comes more from the confusion of why these boards have such non cohesive themes. Overall they are all Star Wars themed, but it would have probably made more sense if there were three board based on Episodes IV, V, and VI. Or you could have made three themes based on main characters like Luke, Han, Yoda. I’m not against Boba Fett, but he originally was a secondary character. Of course he was such a bad ass that he’s been revisited numerous times, so I don’t want to say he doesn’t deserve a board. It would just make a little more sense that if there are only three boards, I’m not sure he should have been a top pick. That being said, I also think that since Episodes I, II, and III would have more cohesive but it would be really nice to just forget those movies. The only saving grace is the Clone War animations.

The other issues come down to how hard it is to read some of the boards. The 3D models are cool, but Boba Fett flying around the board is completely distracting. Luke’s lightsaber is also pretty cool, but it’s so bright and becomes so encompassing, it’s hard to see the ball roll down the lightsaber and again it becomes distracting. If some of these boards were dumbed down a bit, the boards would be easier to read and more enjoyable to play.

This game was reviewed on the Xbox 360.

The first disconnect is the language barrier. I understand this game was not developed in America, and with that, it can be understandable that the main language is not English, but it’s a thin argument at best when a large amount of games come out of Japan and have English dub. When you have to sit through cut scenes and concentrate on reading the sub titles, it takes away from what is actually a cool cut scene approach which look like they were taken from the manga pages.

When it comes to the main characters there’s some good detailing done although the style is generic, in a sense that the characters could have been plucked from any random game. On top of that, all characters are kind of shiny, which in all honesty is weird.

The background levels aren’t much better. For the most part every level is just a corridor. If you throw a bad guy into a wall there is a small amount of level destruction, but it seems obvious that destroying the worlds were not a main focus. In the game Ken gets imprisoned. When it comes time to break out all he has to do is bend the bars making you wonder how it’s even possible to imprison him, and why he didn’t bother to break out sooner.

For the most part the boss fights are not impressive. As it is, the combat system is pretty simple. I’m not asking for Street Fighter, uber combo moves, but something more than a 4 button move would have made the game a little more interesting. The combo’s are quite easy to master but after the second level it all gets a little too generic.

The only remotely impressive feature of the game is the large amounts of hordes you have to fight. This stays in the tradition of the previous games. Back in the day it was impressive to see large amount of bad guys on the screen, but unfortunately it’s no longer such a new concept, and now it looks a little dated. Every hardware has a limit which makes a large amount of bad guys on the screen at one time hard, but again, since we’re nearing the end of the PlayStation 3 life cycle it should be expected that there would be a work around by now.

As cool as it to fight a horde, their AI is not smart making it rather simple to just blow through them with your limited combo’s. You also don’t really see stronger hordes as the levels progress. You pretty much fight the same AI hordes throughout, and it becomes very repetitive, very fast. Once you break through the horde and scatter them, they work very hard to get close to each other again, making it easier to kill them.

I would assume for the most part the developers were really trying to cater to the die hard fans here, rather than bring new people in. The Legend Mode is centered around the original manga. Dream Mode focuses on new stories based on the manga series. In Legend Mode, you play as Ken. In Dream Mode you start with only an unnamed Outlaw. You can play Wasteland Thugs in the Free Mode with the Outlaw, and you can also play online. The options for online are either co-op through Dream Mode, or as a Team of 4.

It seems like the overall issue to Ken’s Rage is that the game lacks a good quality check. It just falls flat in every area, and interest is lost fast when it becomes repetitive. Although it caters to the die hard manga fans, it still lacks polish and makes the game look like it was rushed to the market. With the lack of major content it’s also odd that this download was over 9 GB. I would have just assumed, with the reuse of such generic characters and models that the game could do a better job at managing assets.

This game just reminds us that fighting horde after horde is no longer an interesting concept. There needs to be more variety in game play. There needs to be better skin textures, unless you want us to think the characters are plastic. But most of all, there needs to be quality control on a game like this that just makes you feel that the developer just weren’t fully invested.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 3.

Let’s face it, even Ridley Scott, the guy who created the first Alien movie, had a rough time jumping back into the franchise with Prometheus. Since Alien 3 the franchise has limped along, usually at an embarrassing rate. Despite Joss Whedon’s script for Alien Resurrection and the fan favorite comic books, Aliens VS Predator, which got poorly adapted to screen, the die hard fans still have longed for a proper treatment to the franchise.

In 2010 Rebellion released Aliens VS Predator on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. It was a modest effort, but was a game with three separate campaigns; Aliens, Predators, and Marines, and they were all short with no depth. The saving grace was the multiplayer.

Now helmed by Gearbox, the story picks up from about seventeen weeks after the events in Alien 3. The game starts with a video SOS sent by Hicks, the last remaining of the marines sent in to investigate the sudden loss of communication on planet LV-426. In the movie, the marines get wiped out and Ripley blows up the entire facility.

You play Winters, one of the marines sent in to respond to Hicks’ SOS. The Sulaco, Hicks and Ripley’s ship was last tracked over Fury 161 when there was a fire and Ripley and crew were evacuated during hyper sleep. The Sulaco has now mysterious returned to LV-426 and as the marines you are sent in to the Sulaco to get some answers. Needless to say, the marines are in way over their heads and it all goes to hell very quickly.When the smoke finally clears, you’re on the surface of LV-426 and left to deal with the mess from Ripley’s explosion of the atmosphere processor.

Without giving away any spoilers, the story had some big hurdles to clear after the trilogy was sealed air tight. One of them involves the return of a character, and when asked how they’re still alive, the character decides to skip “the long story” and just say they’re obviously alive. Or why is there breathable air on a planet where the atmosphere processor has been destroyed? Or why do the Xenomorphs resemble the ones from Alien Resurrection, and not Aliens? And why doesn’t Hicks refer to Ripley in his SOS refer to Ripley as “a female” instead of by her name, and she’s actually a lieutenant, not just a civilian.

Regardless of the minor story issues, overall it’s actually a good story, and surely beats out all the other Alien related movies. It isn’t stronger than the original trilogy, but could easily be considered a solid Aliens 4.

The mechanics are pretty straight forward for a first person shooter. Although it feels similar to the game play of Aliens VS Predator, there are some slight changes that are worth noting. Instead of having the motion tracker on display the entire time, you have to press the left shoulder button to display it in Aliens: Colonial Marines. This means that while you’re looking at it, you have to hold the weapon, in the other hand, out of the way, and this means you can’t shoot while looking at the tracker. Although it does hinder you a bit, it makes more sense since that’s exactly what the marines did in the movie.

You can also quickly switch from your primary to secondary weapon. You can also switch weapons with the d-pad, but in the thick of battle the top button is more convenient. Also if you hold down the top button you can shift through a good amount of weapons to set as primary and secondary weapons. There’s a lot of customization in weapons, and Gearbox introduce some weapons like the automatic weapons which seem right at home with the other original weapons.

My favorite part, by far is finding the hidden weapons. If you explore enough you might come across Hicks’ shotgun, Vasques’ smart gun, or Frost’s flame thrower. Once some of these weapons are collected you can equip them as standard and primary weapons, and for the most part, even though I customized a pulse rifle, I still preferred Hudson’s rifle.

The campaigns can be played by yourself or with up to four in co-op mode. My only issue is that in co-op mode, everyone still plays as Winters, instead of another character, like when co-op plays as Dom in Gears of War. If you play as two people it also goes top/down splitscreen, although it would have been nice for side-by-side splitscreen.

Online play is just as solid of game play as offline. Your ranking from campaign mode carries over to online, however since you can’t play as the Xenomorphs offline the marines kind of have an unfair advantage. The Xeno’s take a lot of practice, but once you get the hang of them and rank up, you can be a pretty bad ass mo’fo’. You have the options to play; Extermination – a 6 on 6 game where the marines try to wipe out the egg clusters, Escape – a 4 on 4 game where the marines try to get away from the Xenomorphs, Survivor- a 4 on 4 where the marines have to hold on in a certain amount of time against waves of Xenomorphs and the classic Team Deathmatch which is also 6 on 6.

When it comes to art, there’s no question, Gearbox did their homework. The characters and weapons look great. The levels are unbelievably detailed. And things like Hadley’s Hope is pretty darn accurate, right down to where Ripley slept with Newt under the bed in the med lab in Aliens. The story takes Winters and crew to the original alien ship from the first movie and again the level of detail is top notch. The simple touches like the blue light haze over the eggs shows how devoted Gearbox is to the series.

The only real down fall to Aliens: Colonial Marines is the performance issue. Although there were times where my crew would either get lost, get left behind, or even perform a task that were intended for me, I can still overlook that. I had a hard time getting over the frame rate and screen tearing however. Most cut scenes were just littered with screen tears and sometimes I could be all alone and there would still be horrible screen tearing. It’s not like the game is unplayable at the screen tearing rate, but can be distracting at times.

This game was reviewed on the Xbox 360.

Dungeonland is broken up into two game play styles. You can either play as the Heroes or as a Dungeon Master. As a Hero you can choose between three maps for Adventure Mode; Cannibal Kingdom, DM Tower, and Arena Kingdom. As a Dungeon Master you have only one area to choose for the Dungeon Maestro Mode, however you can select between all the maps within the mode.

Within the Hero mode you can choose between three classes. The Mage class has three styles; Fire, Ice, and Electric, but only Fire is available at first. You need to find money to unlock the other styles. The Rogue has three classes as well, consisting of the Assassin, Gunner, and Archer. The Assassin is also the first class unlocked for the Rogue. The last class is the Warrior with a class in Vanguard, Lancer and Pathfinder. As with the others, the Warrior’s Vanguard is the only class unlocked in the beginning.

The Warrior is your typical melee fighter that needs to be up close and in the battle. The Mage can be short range, and can either be in the thick or slightly out of range for battle. The Rogue serves as the long distance fighter and although he can hold his own in melee he outshines the enemies when he is further away.

All Heroes can be upgraded by buying items in the Item Shop from money collected during battle. Anything from weapons and cloths, down to Perks can be bought to give you a leg up on your foe.

As a Dungeon Master in the Dungeon Maestro Mode, you can deal a tremendous amount of pain to the Heroes. You play with a deck of cards and as your minions collect points, you build up manna which in turn allow you to play certain cards. When you max out your playing card levels you can unleash hordes and then sit back and press the laugh button to maniacally torment the Heroes.

The Maestro’s deck can also be upgraded through the item shop, but you can only hold a certain number of cards, so you need to play your cards right if you want to win.

The game mechanics are pretty straight forward to this game. As the Heroes, it’s really just a hack and slash button masher. As a Dungeon Maestro, it’s as simple as point and click to spawn enemies. The Heroes play better with a gamepad controller while the Dungeon Maestro handles better with the keyboard and mouse.

The art style is clean and looks similar to Wizards 101. Although it isn’t as stylish, it tends to feel like the game is geared more for kids, which can be misleading. And this is Dungeonland’s greatest downfall.

For the most part this game seems to get lost in searching for its target audience. The art style suggests it’s geared for kids, but in Adventure Mode, as a Hero you can only start on a hard difficulty, and it is ever punishing. The only options for the Heroes are Harder and Impossible, and if that isn’t punishing enough, you can add three difficult challenges. At best it’s almost unplayable.

As a Hero your only chance to win is to play as the Assassin who is far from the fight, in order to manage the onslaught. The warrior is completely redundant and for the most part becomes a one shot kill when in the thick of battle. The Mage doesn’t really add anything to game play. The only way to make any headway is to go into the game expecting to lose, and lose badly, but collect as much money as possible. After you’ve collected enough, get to the Item Shop and buy anything you can, like Perks, to give yourself a chance. Truthfully though, it won’t make too much of a difference.

As a Dungeon Maestro, there actually is a mode for Normal, Easy and Very Easy. Oddly enough though, this actually pertains to the Heroes you are trying to kill. So instead of the game being easy for the Dungeon Maestro, you know, the role you’re playing, it’s actually easier for the AI. So, again the game just sets out to punish you. But if you set the game to normal, it’s quite simple to kill the Heroes, which comes back to the main issue.

The game is too hard for the Heroes to ever win. The game is so lopsided I can’t see why anyone would subject themselves to such cruelty from the get go. I understand that people who play through a game, beat it, and then turn the setting up to insane. If the game suggested that it were geared towards these hardcore gamers, it would be understandable, but I doubt those gamers also play Wizards 101. The games suffers through an identity crisis where the art suggests a kids’ game, but the game play difficulty suggests a hardcore gamer. I doubt either demographics will be interested in the latter. Let’s put it this way, a loading screen shows the three Heroes playing the game, and one of them is clearly throwing the controller out of frustration over the game.

To top it off, there’s nothing to draw you into this game. There seems to be a story, but it’s only present on the developer’s website and nowhere in this game. No intro, no videos, and not even a hint to why the Evil Lord Dungeon Master has built an amusement park that isn’t worth the price of admission.

The game also tries to focus on its multiplayer aspect. You can have three players jump in as the Heroes locally, and online you can find plenty of matches. You can also create a match online, or private match. The only downside is that online play is identical to offline, and so you can only have three people in a match, and there isn’t an option for spectators.

This game was reviewed on the PC.

On the surface Omerta can be overlooked with simple game mechanics that make up the same type of Sim games. However, by the time you finish your first mission you can start to see that there is a lot of well thought out depth to the scenarios. The easiest way to make money is to create a speakeasy to sell beer and wine, but it’s not as easy as renting a building and then establishing it. You need to think about supplying as well.

You can either rely on outside suppliers or you can take them over either by raiding them, or using a drive by shooting to make them flee their establishment. Raiding can make the owner upset if he stays and if you do a drive by you bring up your Fear rating, a rating that judges how much the community is afraid of you, and it can also bring the police down on you. Once the police have had enough they launch an investigation and you can either try to bribe them, blame it on someone else, or try to destroy the evidence. Bribing costs money, blaming brings down your Like factors, and destroying evidence becomes a combat mission where if you lose, could cost you some of your henchmen. See, I told you it becomes in depth. And all you wanted to do was open a speakeasy.

The truth is, if the depth wasn’t there, you could easily blow through some of these missions and not even care about the story, but every layer of game play really drives you in and before you know it you’re completely hooked on Omerta. The combat system isn’t all too spectacular though. At times it feels a little tacked on, and can sometimes slow down the pace of the game and story.

In combat, much like X-Com your henchmen can only move a certain amount and still be able to shoot or melee. Melee can be more accurate than shooting, however you have to be one space away from your enemy in order to engage and usually if you don’t take them down during your turn you have to stand in front of them and hope they don’t kill you. Shooting is safer and you can hide behind objects for better coverage and although it may take longer to kill your enemy because you miss more, it’s still the preferred route. In fact one character, who is handy with the knife, is easier to use when you only throw his knife instead of engage in close quarter combat.

Each mission progresses the story, as well as the depth to game play. In the first few missions you only have to worry about making money. Later on you have to also handle taking on tasks for crime lords which can’t be done without still making money. Making seven thousand dollars in a mission seems hard but you also can go to the main map and accept offers from characters to buy or sell products. Some characters offer other services like bringing up your Like or Fear, or some might need a loan or can help with laundering. Later missions also require cleaning the money.

Although every action can be completed using dirty money, I found that clean money works just as well, but there’s no hint to let you know. In fact there are a lot of things in the game that just seemed implied. There’s a time of day system with night and day effects, however there isn’t a clock or calendar to be specific. When a mission requires you to lose the heat in seven days, you really have no idea how long that is.

There’s also no clear breakdown of your expenses. As the game progresses you have to pay your henchmen, the rent on buildings, and other commodities and all you get is a bar at the bottom of the screen to tell you basic numbers such as dirty money, clean money, storage, beer, liquor, like, fear and heat. In order to get stats on how much a certain location is operating you have to click on that particular building. It can show the stats of efficiency, how much is sold, and you have options to upgrade. But there still isn’t a place to look at a breakdown of all establishments operating and how they all stack up.

For the same matter it is also hard to navigate around the screen. I was never introduced to rotating the camera and for the first few missions I stuck with the default camera. This made combat missions hard when the enemy would hide behind an object. Once I found that you could rotate the camera the game play became much easier although there wasn’t a way to go back to default nor could you snap the camera angles. On the town map you can also rotate the camera, but to navigate around the map you have to move your curser to the edges of the screen. This makes it difficult if you only want to mouse over the bottom bar to get a better description of your numbers and the map just keeps scrolling down. It would have been nice to have the option to click and grab the map to move it instead.

Everything else for this game was pretty much done well. Characters are well voice acted, even though some of their lines can be repetitive. The art is also done well, even if most of the times you will have to zoom all the way out to see as much of the map as possible. When you put a task to a henchman, you can select the character and zoom in to see them running down the street. The overall story is pretty engaging, even if slightly predictable. Name another Sim game with a compelling story let alone a story at all though.

Omerta – City of Gangsters will certainly keep you entertained for quite some time. It’s one of those games that on the surface look pretty simple, but it will certainly suck you in. The game play is solid and in depth but doesn’t let you peek under the hood to help micro manage. The combat system changes up the style and is engaging as well but can be auto played at times if it isn’t your cup of tea. If you’re into Sim games, you might want to give this one a try, and if you’re not you can still have some fun.

This game was reviewed on the PC.

Although early reports were that Devil May Cry was going to run on DirectX 11, in my testing on a few machines, I found that the game only runs at DirectX 9. I’ve also found a site with the same numbers.

Although Devil May Cry could have certainly benefited from DirectX 11, with the art style and game play, there’s a possibility you might not notice. The art team did a fantastic job with tricking out the Unreal Engine, and truthfully, it’s one of the nicest examples of how strong the Unreal Engine can be when used by some skilled artists.

I can’t just single out the artists though, there must have been some mad hours spent on coding in the hallways that stretch. You can be running down a corridor that’s only one hundred feet long, and then it breaks and stretches to three to four hundred feet. It can really warp your sense of depth and it’s a great feature.

The only major difference between the consoles and the PC are the controls. With the PC you have the option to play with the keyboard and mouse instead of the controller. I played half the game with the keyboard and mouse setup until I got through a major boss battle. Up until then it all seemed manageable. As the game progressed and more combos were added to the game play it became harder to manage all the keyboard buttons. The key was to taking your time, but when it came to the boss battle where you had to jump over objects and then ground pound triggers that’s when the keyboard and mouse set up just fell apart for me.

Thankfully the PC version does not have an issue with switching from the keyboard and mouse to a game controller. I would recommend playing this game only with a controller since it had become increasingly harder to hit the right combo buttons at triggered events or situations where you need to grapple to one spot and then glide in the air. On the keyboard you are looking at using four or five buttons with well precise timing. On the game controller it took 2.

Although there are options in the graphic settings to turn graphics to ultra, or turn shadows on, if you play the game at low setting, it still holds up very well. On the last two battles I had a performance hit and had to switch my settings down to make game play manageable.

There truthfully aren’t any bonus options to the PC version that the console doesn’t already have. There’s no multiplayer online play and although the consoles can handle online games as well, Steam does a better job. However since there’s no online play it’s more of a moot point.

Overall with the difference between the PC and console version of Devil May Cry being minute I would refer you back to the previous review, here on GamingBolt, created for the console if you want to know about game play and story, as I agree with the the review.

This game was reviewed on the PC.

Anarchy Reigns breaks down the campaign mode into a Black and a White side. On the White side you play as Leo, your typical cyber cop. The Black side is played by Jack, a chainsaw yielding mercenary. Jack is a returning character for Platinum Games. Jack was the main character in Platinum Games’ unsuccessful Mad World, for the Wii. They admitted later that Mad World was not the right game for that console and it’s pretty cool of them to give Jack another chance in a world where he’s right at home.

The campaign starts out in the local place, where everyone’s path crosses and you have a choice to go White/Leo, or Black/Jack. From there, although all stages are the same, you get different missions, depending on your choice. Each stage has Main missions, and Free missions. The main missions progress the story, while the Free missions work on your score. The only way to get through a stage is to clear all the Main missions, and the only way to open the Main missions is by having a high enough score. The easiest way to score is by going through the Free missions, which are also unlocked by your score. You can skip the Free missions if you want and just stay in the open stage but it takes a heck of a lot longer to score, even if there are waves upon waves of thugs.

Even though the sides have different stories, they intertwine from time to time and still come to the same conclusion. Upon beating one side, you immediately get thrown right back into the first scene and the game picks the other side. So, even if you beat the White side, you still have to go through the Black side in order to complete the game. I also found that you can only play one side at a time. If you start the Black side you have to ride it out to the end. If you decide to switch, the only way to do so is by starting the game all over again.

Despite having a Black side and White side to play, there’s actually diversity within the fights. In a number of fights you get a choice between playing with your main character, or another character who’s joined you. With Leo, since he’s a team of three, you get more chances to play with or as his team mates, Sasha and Nikolai. With Jack, since he’s a one man show, you don’t have a team, but you get to also choose from time to time. With everyone’s control being the same, there’s really no difference in fighting and although the idea of playing other characters if a great feature, it doesn’t make a real difference.

The controls are a little complex, but completely manageable. Once you build up your Rampage Gauge you can trigger your Unleash Rampage. This allows you to blow through the small thugs with one hit and take down some beasts with a flurry of damage. The mechanics seemed pretty much on par with Batman, but the locking system seemed a little finicky. You can lock on to one person at a time, but they have to be in front of you. If you see an enemy and they go behind you, you can’t lock onto them until you see them, even if there is only one enemy. In a group you can easily end up attacking in one direction and your character can get carried away and end up fighting in one direction and missing the enemy as they are smart enough to circle you. With Batman’s attacking, the mechanics are set up in a way that Batman is always aware of everyone around him and can leap from one person to another to continuously attack. With Anarchy Reigns pitting you in the same mob attacks, it would have made sense to have this same sort of mechanic.

The art, much like most of Platinum Games, are over the top but with triple A quality. For some reason the main characters are 5 times larger than all thugs. Some characters like Oinkie are just plain annoying, while other characters are over the top Russian stereotypes. And then some characters like Big Bull, Max and Douglas were just bad ass.

In multiplayer online you can play with all of Anarchy Reigns’ characters as well as from some other Platinum Games. You can play with up to 16 people with Battle Royale, Death Match, Team Battle, Survival Co-Op and more. Mechanics stays the same in online, however you can level up online, unlike campaign. As usual Death Match comes down to who can hit their combo buttons first, but I had more fun with the Survival mode. I started with 2 other people online and when they left the game, AI was brought in to keep the fight fair.

Overall Anarchy Reigns is a fun game. The campaign is rather short, even if you play both sides and all Free missions. With the redundancy of playing both sides, there’s a good possibility that there’s not much replay value to the campaign. The online alleviates that issue, and should keep you busy for a while longer. The control combos aren’t as complicated as Street Fighter, but then the auto aiming isn’t as nice as Batman.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 3.

Presented as a side scroller Black Knight Sword actually looks like a user created level from Little Big Planet. The GUI is presented as if the player is watching some sort of play in a theater, and you’re either watching a marionette show or a stain glass window effect, or maybe even actors, but the last one may be a stretch.

The art style feels very abstract, and although some things like the Knight’s sword is cool looking, the big head minions are quite ugly. Sometimes the art looks like someone got carried away with a heavy black pen and went to town with cross hatching. The overall feel of the art is good, but a little bizarre at times.

The mechanics work like any typical side scroller. You have a basic attack, a double jump, magic that can be used sparingly, and a ghost like figure that can either do an area effect, or turn on/open objects for you. With a combo you can evade your enemy, but I found it to be tricky. You can only evade back from an enemy instead of forward and past an enemy. In the case of fighting a giant knight, it works fine to go in for the kill, evade back to avoid a heavy hit and then go back in. In cases where you get attacked by wolves it would have been better to evade past them as they jumped in the air. Instead the mechanics, seeing the wolf as still in front of you, despite it being in the air, would only allow you to evade back, and in most cases right where the wolf would land.

Another feature to collect are Cat Head Grass. They are hidden flower pots with cat heads, scattered about each level. You gain nothing special from finding them, however in the main menu you can select a gallery to look at them and so far, is on pair with making no sense to the game.

For the most part this has got to be one of the most confusing games I’ve come across in a while. Cut scenes are very much like Katamari cut scenes in the sense that it doesn’t make sense and has almost nothing to do with the game itself. You start to get the feeling that the game may have created in a foreign language and poorly translated. There’s a sense that at times it wants to make sense, and then they go and throw a microwave in the levels that spit out hearts to collect. Although collecting the hearts is part of the game, the microwave is a 3D object, unlike the rest of the flat world and just doesn’t make sense. That also goes for the multi colored 3D doors.

There are times when you come across trapped flying things as I’m not sure if they were fireflies or birds or whatever. When you release them you go into a store that again makes very little sense. You can buy health, extra life, extra magic, extra defense, and more as long as you have enough hearts to feed the circular thing with a mouth that speaks broken English.

The problem with the store is that they are pretty rare, and precariously placed. It makes no sense why you would put the store at the beginning of a level where you have no need to replenish your health yet, nor do you have enough hearts to buy anything. With health being so rare, the store would be better suited for a mid level break.

At times the game can be down right brutal. Some bosses are rear impossible to beat, but you’d be lucky to get to them. In the third stage you have to jump across fast moving gears, and if you fall off them you drop to the bottom level where pistons crush you dead very quickly without any chance for recovery. With a low level of lives, this mistake can be costly and you may be forced to restart the entire stage. The difficulty is pretty drastic, and if you find that it’s too much for you, there is no option to change it. If you want to change your difficulty level you must start a new game.

Black Knight Sword may be the perfect game for anyone out there who prefer side scrolling games that feel like they got lost in translation. Although the mechanics can be tricky at times it is very challenging and would not be recommended to a person who is not good at starting games on hard core mode. In the end the game really looks like it was created by a dark tortured artist from Little Big Planet who was forced into a dungeon and forced to make a game regardless of their dialect. If this is the case, please play this game to set that poor fella free. If that is not the case, you can just skip this game.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 3.

And to be fair Pinball FX2 isn’t really a game, it’s more like a loading program but it’s free. If you’re new to Pinball FX, created by ZEN Studios, here’s how it works; you download the free program and then buy the pinball boards separately. You can play trial versions of any board before you buy which takes out the feeling of being stuck with a bad board. But I hardly doubt you’re going to feel like you got stiffed here. Most boards are real fun and cheap, and you can even buy bundled boards for a good deal as well.

For this review I was given the ZEN Classics pack. This pack included Shaman, El Dorado, Tesla and V12. Out of the group I found Shaman the most fun, but I certainly enjoyed every board. Tesla was a steampunk looking board, and looked the best, but I had higher scores on Shaman. V12 was a car themed board and it was also fun, but with so much going on at times I would lose sight of the ball.

The physics of Pinball FX2 is pretty solid. There was never a time where I questioned the bounce or hit of a ball, nor called foul. With the high quality detail on the board, and with the nice reflections, even on the mirrored ball itself, at times you could almost be fooled into thinking you’re playing a real pinball. But if you really have an issue, there’s no worries, you can actually go through the machine and tweak the boards, mechanics, tilts, and just about anything.

One of the coolest features to Pinball FX2 is the scoring. You can obviously score on each board, but thanks to Pinball FX2’s lobby system, all your scores get added up, tournament style. These combined scores create your rank which you can compare with your friends or other people online.

Another neat feature is the multiplayer modes. There are two ways to play, either take turns or split screen. I tried the split screen, and then set the goal of first to 10 million with a 10 percent penalty, which is the default settings. I can honestly say my wife and I had a great time. Having your board halved makes it more difficult to keep track of the ball and even action, but considering how pinball is typically a one player at a time game, the half screen issue is very minuet.

There are a few minor issues with Pinball FX2’s setup. The main issue for me came with visibility. There’s nothing wrong with the level of detail in the game, it’s just hard to see everything on the board at the angle the camera is set at. I couldn’t find a way to move the camera more, and I know for some people it would be cool if you go top down on the board and turn your tv vertical. By default however the camera is set at an angle which makes it hard to see any play in the back field. When the ball does go out of view or in the back field a pop up window will appear on the top right of your screen to show you what’s going on. Add this screen to the window on the top left that shows your score and multipliers and it becomes a little overwhelming.

The only other issue I can see to Pinball FX2 is, what I would consider, its main competitor, Future Pinball. I looked into Future Pinball a few years ago and was thoroughly impressed. It’s a free program to your PC with free boards created by users. Many of these boards are replicas of original boards. The best feature I saw was that you could take two monitors and make one the play field and the other a backboard. I’ve even seen some people make huge cabinets with giant flat screen tvs, and then they add in a Wiimote for tilt. The draw backs to Future Pinball is that your customer service is other users and if you really want to get the full feel of the program you have to have enough money for 2 tvs, and carpentry skills to make a cabinet. In comparison Pinball FX2 is cheaper and easier to run.

Pinball FX2 brings back the essence of old school gaming through pinball. If you’re looking to start your collection, the ZEN Classics pack is a quick shot to some fun and unique boards. The trial versions of every board make it easy to pick and choose the right boards for your library. I would have never thought I would have had as much fun with multiplayer as I did when I tried out the split screen options. The pros to Pinball FX2 easily outweigh the cons here and if you’re a person who enjoys the small games on your console, you’ll easily find a board worth playing.

This game was reviewed on the Xbox 360.

If you’re going to select one company for tie-in games, you really should look no further than Monolith Productions. Back in the day they were responsible for Tron 2.0, The Matrix Online, as well as their own IP No One Lives Forever. If you have not played any of these games, you’re truly missing out on some great games with a strong element of storytelling. Monolith has clearly shown that they can be faithful to the content of the tie-in but also expand to make an enjoyable experience.

Guardians of Middle-Earth is a little different from their titles previously mentioned. Most of their games used to be first person shooters with an emphasis on a story. Guardians of Middle-Earth is a third person game and the gameplay here is quite simple, destroy the enemy’s tower before they destroy yours.

There’s a deep level of game play set up that really needs to be appreciated. You can easily ignore strategy and go for a hack and slash style but you’ll quickly find yourself the only one dying. This game pulls away from your crappy hack and slashes fest and proves that if you can play it cool and try not to die, you will be rewarded by skill and enjoyment.

The gameplay is broken down into 2 parts, in-game and in-lobby. In-game is pretty simple with a straight forward layout for buttons which are mapped to special skills that take time to regenerate. You still have a basic skill that is strong enough to get the kills you need in order to drive the forces back. When you level up on the battlegrounds, you can upgrade skills and to be fair, each battleground starts every player at level one. Players can level up by killing armies, controlling points, destroying towers, upgrading towers, killing other players, and the list goes on. Matches are 5 players per side, and the Battlefield throws out armies for each side. When you upgrade your towers, you upgrade your armies and you can only do that after you’ve leveled up yourself.

After a match you can get experience points for certain skills, and yes you can even get points for having the most deaths. These points level up your rank and unlock more skills for you. Certain ranks unlock slots on your D-pad where you can map extra perks that you’ve earned from some battles. You also get in-game cash which can be used to buy gems, relics, potions and more characters. In the lobby you can also create your own load outs for characters by building your own belts. If that’s too much work, it’s quite alright seeing how every character has their own load out. So when you select a character to play you can either select their default load out or use a custom one.

There are also a huge amount of characters to choose from. The game does not stick to only one series as you can pick from either good or bad from Lord of the Rings all the way to the Hobbit movies. By default you start with some good characters like Gandolf, and there are also characters of the week. Once you get enough money you can buy characters like Goluum or Dori.

In the lobby you can either jump into a quick match or select from Battlegrounds, Elite Battlegrounds Skirmishes, or custom matches. You need to rank up in order to play Elite, but they all have some commonalities. The most you can have is 5 versus 5 in most matches, but in certain selections, the slots can be filled by AI if a user doesn’t jump in. This helps from having people wait forever for a person to join. In a few matches I ended up being the only real person playing while all the other slots were filled with AI, and let me tell you, they’re good.

Rounding out the package, the art is top notch. The intro cinematic is pretty impressive, and the in-game characters all have a high level of detail. The battle arenas are all built the same, seeing how the game play doesn’t change, but each level can be different depending on trees, shires, and other cool details.

If there’s anything negative to say about the game, it’s too bad there’s no offline campaign. Monolith is fantastic with their story telling, and no doubt they could have easily developed an entertaining campaign. Although there is no direct single player mode, you can create a custom match to play only AI, and it’s pretty satisfying.

If you’re in the mood for a well developed PVP game, don’t throw your money at those other knock off games. Guardians of Middle-Earth is the game you want. It may lack a single player campaign, but you have options to play the game by yourself if you want. There’s deep enough strategy that makes you avoid the clustering of a death match, and allows you to really think about how to win, rather than how to kill. Intuitive button mapping, leveling up in and out of the battle grounds and great artwork makes this game stand heads above the rest.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 3.