Do you remember Bertram, Stewie’s evil twin from a few years ago? Well, he’s back… technically. He was killed in our universe however he’s still going strong in all of the other universes which are coincidently made up of different episodes from the Family Guy series. His goal is to destroy the universe which Stewie lives in but they aren’t going to let it happen that easily as Stewie has thankfully made a multi-universe remote with a tracker so he can follow every universe Bertram visits and attempt to take him out; if only it was that easy.

If you’re a fan of the Family Guy TV series; you’ll recognise the vast majority of the settings for the lengthy levels while you fight off Bertram’s armies. As soon as you enter the Back to the Multiverse game, you’ll visit the Greek (college) frat house while helping Mort collect resources to host the best party possible to fighting off Santa’s overworked elves, eventually fighting a big bad boss at the end of each level; most taking you 30 or so minutes long but there is only ten levels in total, so don’t expect to be playing this for long.

A Family Guy game was always going to be an unknown, you had no idea how the game will play coming into it and interestingly enough; it was the complete opposite of what I was expecting. Instead of a weird platformer, you’ve got an incredibly poor third person shooter which you can unfortunately drag someone else in to play as Brian. Don’t worry though; there’s at least a reasonably large arsenal of weapons that you can vaporise your enemy oh so witty enemies with.

As you can imagine, all the enemies are people that you’ve seen in the Family Guy franchise at some point and they do love their little catch phrases which will drive you insane by the end of each level. Every time you dispose of one, they’ll drop a random chunk of money which you and your coop partner share this money and can be spent on a bunch of goodies such as new guns, costumes and character upgrades at shop portals that are dotted throughout each level.

If the normal weapons aren’t your thing, there are plenty of special weapons which can either be found in super secret hiding places or purchased for a small fee. The special throwable weapons range from the angry chicken which hatches from a golden egg and will go around beating the crap out of everything to Joe Swanson speeding around in his heavily armed wheelchair.

You’d think considering the game is based on a cartoon that it’d at least look decent, right? Well, that hasn’t happened, even the cut scenes there is always something looking horrendously wrong with someone or something. I’m a huge fan of the cell shaded style but it doesn’t change the fact no character looks quite right.

One of the few redeeming factors of Family Guy: Back to the Multiverse is the voice acting as all of the voices are (seemingly) done by the people from the show and it has the same level of dodgy one liners that the fans of the franchise have grown to love. A few extra catch phrases here and there wouldn’t go a miss as they do become just frustrating.

The lacking single player is accompanied by an even worse multiplayer that after one or two games, I don’t want to touch it again. It feels like it’s been implemented because they needed an extra bullet point for the back of the box; both competitive and cooperative modes are available for you and your friends to participate in.

This game was reviewed on the Xbox 360.

Remember a few months back when EA announced that its BioWare developed Star Wars MMO, The Old Republic was going free to play?

Well, the restrictions that will be implemented onto players which plan on playing the free to play model have finally came to light and they’re quite… strict. Don’t get me wrong, there was of course going to be limitations as to what non-paying players would be able to do but this may of taken it a lil’ bit to far as it will severely impact the experience of the player.

Full details on what can and can’t be done can be found below.

Three Flashpoints per week
Three Warzones per week
Three Space Missions per week
The option to buy a weekly premium pass
Inventory expansion and cargo hold restrictions
Field revivals upon death are restricted
Character creation restrictions
Limited quick travel
Restrictions on login wait time

Instead of spending all your time around one measly town, you’ll be exploring every inch of Paradise Island in Naughty Bear: Panic in Paradise; each of the bears has its own little area in which you’ll brutally defluffify him. Unfortunately, you won’t be doing this in free roam; you’ll have to complete each objective individually before heading back to the campaign screen to pick your next target.

In total there are 36 weird and wonderful teddy bears which you’ll need to exterminate if you want to complete the game. If you’re more of a completionist however, Naughty Bear: Panic in Paradise offers a good chunk of replayability, giving the player the choice to earn scores on each level and depending on the score you receive, earning yourself either a bronze, silver or gold trophy. As well as quickly being able to see your score compared to your friends.

Paradise Island is a truly interesting place, containing everything your heart could ever desire (literally). You’ll visit run of the mill areas such as hotel lobbies to mind boggling, mad scientist lairs which are creating portals to another dimension. Be sure to check how you’re supposed to kill your target though, as if you don’t do it in the exact way described, you’ll end up pissing away hours, repeating the same mission until its eventually performed correctly.

I know, killing a bear in a certain way can’t be that difficult, right? Wrong. When you start any new mission, you’re giving a basic riddle as to what you need to do to properly *kill* the target, as just beating him to death with your fists just isn’t good enough, apparently. It can be anything from choking him to death with your bare, naked hands to drowning an evil teddy bear oil tycoon on his owl fuel. I know you’re trying to make it seem funny with the riddles but they just become frustrating; there’s nothing wrong with just saying what needs to be done.

A really neat new feature in Naughty Bear: Panic in Paradise is the ability to spend the coins which you earn in game (where before, they only helped with earning a better level rating). The coins will let you buy all sorts of new goodies for Naughty Bear which will affect how effective he is in different situations, letting you tailor your armour and weapons to how you play. If you want to become a tank, buy lots of heavy armour but you won’t have the stamina to run far but you can also go the complete opposite direction and becomes a deadly assassin but you’ll probably die in just a few blows.

Unfortunately, the combat is still nothing to shout from the rooftops about; it’s still the same button bashing-fest that its predecessor was except now there’s the ability to perform heavy hits, bear-kicks and super-screams to mix it up a lil’ bit. Thankfully, it doesn’t feel as sloppy as its little brother and I think a lot of that is to do with the huge amount of weapons which you’re now able to play around with (and there are bloody hundreds of them!).

The problem is that the lack of combos does get boring after a while, even attempting to break it up and trying to get bears to kill themselves wears thin, especially when it makes no bloody sense how you’re supposed to do it. Then when you eventually discover how to unlock new items, you’ll spent 90% of your time repeating the same tactic of grabbing unsuspecting bears and dragging them into bushes to steal their disguise, which again, does absolutely bugger all; even killing them on random objects in the environment gets tedious (yet still entertaining).

Pretty much every weapon you can imagine can be utilised in some sinister way in Naughty Bear: Panic in Paradise; everything from weird feathers to the alien ‘Sword of Peace’ can be yours to slaughter the inhabitants of Paradise Island. Each of which have a truly insane ‘kill move’ (execution), watching a bear head get beaten into the ground has never been so entertaining to watch.

Naughty Bear: Panic in Paradise is bloody fantastic; yeah, its predecessor was crappy but every series is welcome to a second attempt, especially when it turns out like this. Naughty Bear was meant to be an Xbox Live Arcade title from the start and the amount of content you’re receiving in this package is well worth the 1,200 Microsoft point price tag. It may still have a few annoying problems but this is a major step in the right direction.

Oh and thanks for keeping the original narrator; that chap never fails to make me laugh.

This game was reviewed on the Xbox 360.

Xbox Live Gold members, you’re going to love this recently announced sale on our beloved marketplace. An enormous range of Activision content is on sale from today through October 8th and you’l be able to pick up everything from Call of Duty map packs to Activision published Arcade titles such as the incredibly addictive Geometry Wars 2.

Full list and prices below, it’s a fantastic sale:

Remember that super crazy film which was shown at a film festival in Berlin and had a trailer on YouTube which exploded over the internet due to its truly crazy story line about Nazi’s living on the moon, waging war on Earth? It’s about to get a game adaptation.

TopWare Interactive, the chaps behind the Two Worlds series has decided to take it upon themselves with assistance from the studio behind the movie to turn it into a suprisingly interesting sounding game which will be hitting retailers around the world on November 30th for Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC.

When I first heard Iron Sky: Invasion, I instantly assumed it’d be another shooter being chucked into the already overcrowded market however it’s actually quite the opposite. Instead, you’ll be defending Earth with its range of super-secret space ships against the evil Nazi onslaught however you better get working on your politics as you’ll want to avoid stepping on anyone’s toes or suffer the consequences.

Space combat, Nazi’s, politics, humour? Can’t help but be curious.

If you’re one of the lucky people who’ve dropped money on a Windows 8 device (or OS), you’ll be pleased to know that Xbox Live for Windows 8 will be dropping a huge range of titles starting October 28th, continuing throughout the Christmas period and beyond.

Microsoft has announced that a huge range of developers are now supporting the platforms, big names such as Rovio, MiniClip and GameLoft, just to name a few. The announced titles will be available on all Windows 8 devices, some of which will be exclusive to the platform.

The list of current announced titles are:

1. 4 Elements II Special Edition

2. A World of Keflings

3. Adera: Episode 1

4. Adera: Episode 2

5. Adera: Episode 3

6. Angry Birds

7. Angry Birds Space

8. Big Buck Hunter Pro

9. BlazBlue Calamity Trigger

10. Collateral Damage

11. Crash Course GO

12. Cut the Rope

13. Disney Fairies

14. Dragon’s Lair

15. Field & Stream Fishing

16. Fruit Ninja

17. Gravity Guy

18. Gunstringer: Dead Man Running

19. Hydro Thunder Hurricane

20. IloMilo

21. iStunt 2

22. Jetpack Joyride

23. Kinectimals Unleashed

24. Microsoft Mahjong

25. Microsoft Minesweeper

26. Microsoft Solitaire Collection

27. Monster Island

28. PAC-MAN Championship Edition DX

29. Pinball FX 2

30. Reckless Racing Ultimate

31. Rocket Riot 3D

32. Shark Dash

33. Shuffle Party

34. Skulls of the Shogun

35. Taptiles

36. Team Crossword

37. The Harvest HD

38. Toy Soldiers Cold War

39. Wordament

40. Zombies!!!

All games are fully supported by your typical Live components such as achievements and some form of multiplayer such as leader boards, showing you and your friends scores.

It seems the launch of Guild Wars 2 was even bigger than ArenaNet ever expected as they’ve had to temporarily suspend sales of Guild Wars 2 via the online store.

ArenaNet announced this unfortunate decision a few hours age on it’s Facebook page. The main reason for this decision is to ensure current players get the most enjoyable experience they can on the already extremely overcrowded servers; digital sales will be turned back as soon as the infrastructure is in place to handle the high load.

One thing to note: you’re still able to purchase the game via the retailer of your choice and play it as much as you want.

The recently launched MMORPG went through months of beta testing however the first week of the game being in the public’s hands has been filled with problems ranging from log in servers being completely inaccessible to major game crashes after attempting to create your character.

Xbox Live has just received a big content boost today with several new additions making its way to the app marketplace.

The BBC iPlayer is benefiting the most from this update as it’ll now feature a range of BBC radio stations such as BBC One and BBC Five as well as adding the ability to search for BBC-specific content. The full list can be found below:

· BBC 1xtra
· BBC Radio 2
· BBC Radio 3
· BBC Radio 4
· BBC Radio 5 Live
· BBC Radio 6
· BBC Asian Network
· BBC World Service

That’s not all though; the brand new Sky Now TV app is now available on Xbox Live which let’s users pay a small fee to rent a film of their choice or pay £15 for a month of free movies. The Sky Now TV service is soon to see the addition of Sky Sports and Sky One, great for us who don’t own a Sky package.

Let’s not forget that Netflix also recently introduced ‘Just for Kids’ making child-friendly content easier to find as well as Blinkbox, another way for Live users to rent movies digitally. It’s a good time to be a Live owner.

Major League Gaming has announced that Halo 4 will be making its professional gaming debut this November at the MLG Fall Championship; days before it officially launches around the world on November 6th for Xbox 360.

It sounds super exciting but as of right now, the game will only be playable for professional players in a one off, pre-launch event which kicks off on November 2nd and ends on the 4th, running throughout the Fall Championship weekend.

Major League Gaming are still yet to announce the number of teams competing, how much prize money is up for grabs and how teams will be able to enter the tournament (whether it’s invite-only). It is expected that they’ll announce the specific details for the highly anticipated event in the coming days and whether or not the public will be able to get their hands on it.

It’s going to be a massive year for eSports with both Halo 4 and Black Ops 2 pushing competitive gaming leagues, bring on the 2012-13 season.

Here we go ladies and gentlemen, a brand new Indie Royale game bundle is available for purchase right now for your beloved PC, Mac and Linux systems.

If you aren’t familiar with the Indie Royale system let me quickly give you a run down: If you head over to their website, you’ll be able to purchase the bundle for any amount as long as it’s over the minimum amount however the longer you wait, the more expensive it gets. If you pay over a certain amount, you’ll even be entitled to a free download of the incredible Handheld Heroes album.

The six games which are available in the pack are:

• Shattered Horizon – Steam (PC)
• Analogue: A Hate Story – Steam (PC, Mac), Linux, Desura (includes OST & DLC)
• Da New Guys – Windows, Desura (includes OST)
• Super Amazing Wagon Adventure – Windows, Desura (Indie Royale exclusive debut)
• Waves – Steam (PC), Windows, Desura (includes OST)
• MiniFlake – Windows, Desura (Alpha)

What’re you waiting for?! At the time of writing this, you can pick up this fantastic bundle for just £3.41 or with the album for £5.15.

Indie Royale website link.