So this is nice! Kalypso Media have revealed their plans to release the Tropico DictNator Pack in the UK on September 12th of this year. “But what is this collection of games” I hear you say. “Don’t I already own these games because of Steam sales?” I hear you call.

Well first of Tropico DictNator Pack is like the grandmaster collection of Tropico games. It collects Tropico one, two, three and four into once nice and neat little bundle for your gaming and ruling pleasure. Straight from the Department of Tropican Historical Manipulation, this collection exists to “preserve the legacy of El Presidente and remind the people of his absolute brilliance”.

But it doesn’t stop there, that wouldn’t be impressive enough for El Presidente. Each of the four games also gets their free major expansion packs for free!

• Tropico 1 will get the Paradise Island, the lonely banana haven.
• Tropico 2 will get the Pirate Cove where players take on the role of playing a ruling pirate king!
• Tropico 3 receives Absolute Power with the return of El Presidente.
• Tropico 4 will get the Modern Times expansion wherein the player will guide Tropico into the 21st century for good or for ill.

That’s quite a bundle! But regarding your second point. Yes, you probably did pick up these games in the sales.

A new DLC, ‘Serious Business’, has been released by Kalypso Media for Omerta – City Of Gangsters, and is available for download now. The update can be downloaded from Xbox Live.

This new DLC will provide players with two additional maps, which can be utilized for both multiplayer mode and in customizable sandbox games. Additionally, several new features have been added, including a rival gang in single player mode, newer and more varied difficulty settings, additional options regarding the construction of buildings, the ability to travel by car, and tweaks in terms of balancing.

In addition to the added features, Serious Business will also provide Omerta – City Of Gangsters with several general game play updates based on gamer feedback.

Omerta: City Of Gangsters is a simulation game, originally released in 2013 by developers Haemimont Games and publishers Kalypso Media across Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Xbox 360. Check out the Serious Business update today.

lien Spidy is a platforming arcade title that features a cutesy spider that traverses many challenging levels where it must collect as many items as possible throughout his journey. How does his adventure turn out in the long run? Well, let’s find out.

Presentation:

The game is presented in a charming and a cute alien-like personality. The small spider is an alien and all he wants is just to travel the worlds and collect items to score points. The music is appropriate for the game and it was never annoying to listen to it as you play. The graphics is a mix of 2D/3D, 2D backgrounds and 3D spider. It’s not a gorgeous looking game, but it does the job done and fits with the overall theme of the game.

Gameplay:

Alien Spidy consists of very simple mechanics. The core of the game is to platform through the level as fast as possible, have least amount of deaths and collect as many items as you can by the end of the level. If you die or take a long time to finish a level, you will be deducted a certain amount of points.

The first few levels in the game act as tutorials. One tutorial teaches you the jumping mechanics, while others tell you how to use your spider web to create a rope and be able to swing from one place to another. The tutorials give a pretty good idea on what to do and how the game works.

Alien Spidy has 3 different worlds. Each world has many difficult courses; every course also has a certain platforming rhythm to it. The later levels get really challenging, but hopefully by that time you’re used to the flow of the game and the player is good with timing of his/her actions.

In one of the levels I was going through a cave with many dangerous objects that could kill me on contact, so I had to be very careful. In another level, I had to be precise and quick with the rope swinging mechanic in order to go with the flow.

The later levels mix all of the mechanics together to create more of a challenging and unique experience. Checkpoints are provided throughout the levels, so if you mess up you will respawn at a certain point of the course.

Throughout the game you come across power-ups. One power-up allows Spidy to do super jumps; another one can provide him with a magnet. These power-ups break up the pacing of the levels and make the game more fun.

The scoring system is a core part of Alien Spidy. Players have to travel as quickly as possible if they want to nail that high score. The higher score you get the more stars you earn for the level.

The player can earn to a total of up to 5 stars. If you manage to get 5 stars in every single level in the world you will earn an achievement. There is a separate achievement for getting 5 stars in the entire game.

The game is addicting and a lot of fun, especially when you’re going through the levels in a perfect manner. It gives you that hyper adrenaline rush once you’re done with a level and have scored 5 stars after going through the difficult platforming course.

Gamers who love to perfect levels will be spending a long time in each of the challenging platforming courses.

The Problems

Thankfully, Alien Spidy is not filled with glitches or a crazy amount of issues. However, the controls of the game can be very unresponsive at times and can lead to a frustration. One of the levels I had to jump of a platform at the right time to avoid something, so I press the jump button and Spidy doesn’t jump.

At the moment, I thought it was me being bad with my timing, but it wasn’t. This happened many times all throughout the game and it was annoying. This is a platforming game and having unresponsive controls can make/break the game. I hope there will be a future patch to fix this issue.

Overall

Alien Spidy is actually a good game. I love the concept of racing through a level, collecting as many items as possible, failing as least as you can and achieving a high score by the end. It provides a fun and fast paced platforming arcade style gameplay. However, the unresponsive controls of this game can really bog down the gameplay experience.

If it wasn’t for the controls then the game would be much more addicting than it already is. However, I would personally give this game a chance and hope that the developers will appreciate the support and fix the issue in a patch or a future sequel if there is ever one.

This game was reviewed on the Xbox 360.

The Style

The game’s art is stylized as a cartoon, bright vivid colors, a little bit of cel-shading and a retro mafia/robbers era, it’s fun too look at and fits with the gameplay and music very well. Overall, I personally enjoy these kind of artistic looks, when the art complements the gameplay, then it was done correctly. Also, it’s nice to see something color-friendly like this, as opposed to majority of the game’s that have been released in the past. It’s a rare occassion to see and play a game that looks like a Saturday night cartoon show.

The Gameplay

Dollar Dash is an arcade game that was designed for the multi-player from the ground up, however it does have the option to play with bots if you want to try out the game and learn the ropes. The game has 3 different playable modes with a total of up to 4 players at a time: Dollar Dash, Hit’n’Run and Save the Safe. Dollar Dash is probably the best out of all these modes, it’s the main core mode that the game was designed for.

In Dollar Dash your objective is too gather up as much as money your robber is able to hold with his moneybag, once the moneybag is full your next objective is to run towards a getaway vehicle to deposit the cash to score for points. When you set up the game, you can choose what the final goal is for points, once a robber has reached the specified goal number then he wins the game.

There are other robbers that try to stop you by picking up defensive, crowd control and offensive power ups. There are different kind of weapons you can acquire, such as snowballs, rockets, bombs and even a cacti that you can throw at your opponents. One of my favorite power-ups is the jelly shield, once picked up and used, your character will be surrounded by a shield made out of jelly, this shield reflects any incoming attack towards you.

In Dollar Dash if you land a hit with one of your power-ups the robber drops 1 stack of cash, the more hits the more money he drops. Overall, your in a constant brawl for money who’s trying to be best thief in the game. This creates a lot of comical scenarios with you and your buddies, it’s a very relaxing and fun experience.

The game has a good variety of different maps, each map provides a different scenario. For example in the Vault map your not only dealing with other 3 players, but you’re also dealing with NPC patrols in the bank, if they notice you, they will start running towards you to knock you out. Once knocked out, you will lose the money you were carrying and be sent back at the starting point of where you originally started on the map.

This adds an interesting dimension to the competitive level of the game, but it can also cause a little of frustration due to the fact that too many things can be happening on screen at a time which causes confusion. Maps like “Arena” have many different types of hazards that appear throughout the match, anything from spikes, walls that come up and other things that you can imagine in an arena will start interfering between you and your opponents.

Hit’n’Run is more of your typical Deathmatch mode, you run around the map, pick up power ups and try to knock out other robbers to score points. Whoever gets the to the score goal first wins, this is a basic gameplay mode that in my opinion is not as fun as Dollar Dash. However, it’s always nice to have the option of just being able to beat the crap out of your friends, talk trash and have fun.

Save the Safe is the third playable mode in Dollars Dash, there is a safe in a middle of the map, whoever grabs the safe and manages to keep defending it from others will start scoring points overtime. The longer you’re able to hold the safe, the more points you score, once you have reached the score limit the game is over.

The multiplayer surprisingly has different ranks you can achieve, and money that you can earn to spend in the shop for vanity items. You can customize your robber, with different hats, buy upgrades for power-up, you can also equip your robber with perks and taunts. You can tell that the developers have went all out for multiplayer, even though it’s an arcade game it still manages to have a robust multiplayer component that most retail games have.

None of the stuff feels tacked on, plus there will be more downloadable content for the game in the future, so if you enjoy the game then there is something to look forward too. Hopefully a sequel will be happening too, if the game gains enough sales and popularity. I believe this game has good potential to become a pretty popular online arcade multiplayer experience.

 My only real gripe with this game are how the controls handle the power-up system. When you pick up power-ups they’re mapped to 3 different buttons. X, B and RT, and because of the hectic chaos that goes on the game it can get rather confusing to try to use power-up because it’s hard to remember which power-up belongs to which button.

There have been many times where I have pressed the incorrect button and ended up wasting my other power-up that I wanted to use later. Majority of the offensive power-up are usually reserved for RT, defensive power-ups take up the X, and B uses crowd control. However, once you have played the game for a few hours you’ll be able to get used to it, but it takes some time.

Overall – I am pretty pleased with Dollar Dash game and I hope that gamers will enjoy it. It’s a fun fast-paced multiplayer game that let’s you have fun on your couch with your friends or online. If you’re just trying to learn the game, you can play it single-player with bots, with a map of your choice and even set difficulty settings to either learn the game or challenge yourself.

The game was reviewed on the Xbox 360.

So, before we go any further, I believe it bears merit to actually try and describe what kind of a game Port Royale 3 is. Self described as a ‘strategy’ game, and variously referred to as a ‘simulator’ and an ‘adventure’ game, I believe it’s none of those three, but somehow a mixture of all of them. Think Sid Meier’s Pirates (an excellent game, by the way, and one that I whole heartedly recommend), and you’ve got a rough idea. Unfortunately, where Pirates was absolutely brilliant, Port Royale 3 seems to falter somewhat in several key areas. In other areas, it seems to make no sense, as some of the mechanics it introduces- such as the ‘popularity’ system (why am I, as a trader, concerned about my popularity?)- fail to add anything meaningful to the gameplay at all. In spite of that, it plays decently, and will actually end up taking more of your time than you’d imagine. Eventually, you’ll stop playing and realize you just spent hours on the game. You’ll then stop and wonder how it managed to do that.

Port Royale 3 is a game that allows you to play two ways- either as an adventurer, or as a trader. The former option is where the most tedious mechanics of the game show up most often, such as the combat, or the missions that mandate you sailing through the empty Caribbean seas as you hunt down some rogue pirate ship in a vague rescue mission.

On the other hand, you can choose to focus on just trading, and this is ultimately where the game begins to show its strength. It’s not a convincing economy simulator, and it can often be a bit too simplistic, but it is incredibly addictive. Of course, you might ask yourself why you would be interested in playing a glorified economics 101 sim in the first place, but the simple answer is, it’s fun and it’s addictive, and almost unexpectedly so. You have several ports, and you can buy or sell goods on each port. You can either buy them in bulk, thereby reducing the total amount of good in supply locally, causing its prices to rise (this means you can sell your own goods for a tidy profit), or you can try and sell them in bulk, causing prices to crash as you flood the market. Generally, these turn out to be zero sum strategies, and you will be better served trying to trade in more reasonable quantities across different ports.

The model is demanding and exacting, sometimes unfairly so. The game requires a healthy amount of wealth for you to accomplish anything meaningful, but the economic model of the game forbids you from earning any reasonable gold in anything less than a few hours. Trading, while fun, tends to get tedious after a while, and might prompt you to eventually undertake one of the previously mentioned missions, to set out on an ‘adventure’ to break the monotony. Unfortunately, that in itself entails aimless wandering, and then some combat that, while requiring a bit of foresight and planning (the outcome is predicated on pre determined stats, such as the number of weapons your ship and crew have, and their distribution), it feels completely uninvolved, since you don’t seem to have any immediate effect for that very reason.

Ultimately, Port Royale 3 is a game of missed opportunities. The combat, the trading, the ‘adventuring,’ all seem to be sound in theory but flawed in execution. Some of its mechanics are absolutely nonsensical, and add nothing to the game whatsoever and even detract from it, like the popularity system. And it can be mind numbingly banal. And yet somehow, you pour hours into it before you catch yourself. It might not be the best game ever made, but it does take up a lot of your time. At least you can’t accuse it of being poor value for money.

This game was reviewed on the PC.

Kalypso Media has announced a digital distribution deal for Anna, the first person horror adventure title from developers Dreampainters. Anna will be available to purchase on PC and Mac through Kalypso’s digital distribution partners from 21st September 2012 for £7.99/€9.99/$9.99.

Here’s the game as described by the devs:

Anna is a first-person horror adventure that explores the darkest depths of the human psyche. Set in an abandoned sawmill nestled high in the mountains, Anna challenges you to uncover horrific clues and use them to solve puzzles related to your character’s dark past.  As you play, Anna will change locations and unveil new secrets. The way you play will not only determine the mental health of your main character, but will also lead to one of three possible endings.

Features:

• A haunting  tale of psychological terror
• Three possible endings, each determined by the player’s actions in the storyline
• Physics-based environmental puzzles
• A faithful 3D recreation of the Italian countryside and a sinister sawmill that await your exploration
• Atmospheric soundtrack
• Brain-twisting puzzles to solve and horrific clues to uncover

The digital version of Anna will also include the following bonus material:

• Photos of the real-world sawmill location
• Complete soundtrack
• Main character’s notebook in English and Italian