The tutorial level begins with you about to head into an anomaly and it’s here that the game slowly eases you into the mechanics; you’ll have to swap the order of units about to form a more strategically viable lineup, activate suit commands to protect your units, and be constantly changing your path through the level to get through in one piece. There are a series of fixed paths throughout each mission that your squad will rigidly adhere to, with your control over their movement limited to where they’ll turn at each crossroad and what order they’ll move through the terrain. Your commander, however, is free to move across the map as he wishes, which allows him to pick up and use various suit abilities in whatever way you see fit, though as he can’t actually fire on any of the enemies himself – your role in the game is a far more non-violent one as you simply have to protect your squad as they take on those pesky aliens.

Wait, aliens? I fear I’ve got ahead of myself here so allow me to explain: once you’ve passed through the anomaly you discover that it wasn’t a comet that killed everyone inside those major cities, but vastly technologically superior aliens that appear entirely in the form of various turrets attempting to block you from your objectives. Hold on a second… you have to take various fixed paths through a level whilst protecting your units from turrets and traps? And then it hits you. Anomaly: Warzone Earth is a tower defence game, but not in the way you think, because you’re the one attacking the towers, not defending them.

Anyone expecting a similar kind of twist to the story will come away feeling disappointed as there’s no real complexity to it whatsoever. The game tells you that the ‘comet’ destroyed several major cities around the world, but you’ll only find yourself visiting two throughout the campaign, and you visit one of those cities twice. In addition, there’s a plot point that comes up halfway through the story that’s totally ignored until you’ve finished the final level, yet fails to surprise or shock in any manner.  Sadly, the voice acting is rather naff on the whole, with a couple accents verging on a stereotype level that is a touch more than is really comfortable, and not aided at all by what is some pretty mundane writing throughout.

As you progress through the story you’ll slowly be introduced to additional forces for your squad, and so while you’ll start with APCs and Crawlers, you’ll soon be able to bolster your forces with tanks and units that fire plasma on multiple targets and vehicles that provide suit upgrades or shield nearby units for extra protection. Each type of unit varies in terms of attack and defence, and all of them can be upgraded up to three times (starting with the cost of the original unit and doubling afterwards), provided you have the cash. Attaining more cash is done by both destroying the enemy defences and from collecting the Carusaurum you’ll find scattered about each level, with the riskier paths potentially granting you more of the elusive material with which to reinforce your squad.

Also vital for keeping your squad alive are the suit abilities you’ll be able to deploy; every level will give you a certain amount of abilities at the outset and will grant you more depending on how many enemies you destroy. You’ll start out with the repair ability, then be able to launch smokescreens to make your units harder to hit, decoys to distract enemy turrets, and even launch some death from above in the form of airstrikes. Non-airstrike abilities last for a short time and affect a designated radius, so it’s always wise to think carefully about where you put them, as it’s all too easy to use an ability just in case only to find that it would have seen much better use around the corner. Although, that said, you should never plan too far ahead.

One of my biggest peeves is when a game gives the illusion of choice and then wrenches it away from the player whenever it can. Unfortunately, Anomaly: Warzone Earth is so horribly guilty of this that it’s practically rolling in the victim’s blood at the crime scene. Before every mission the game will tell you to plot a path through to the objective, but after the third mission I genuinely stopped bothering to do so, because it normally takes less than a minute before the game finds a contrived reason for you to completely alter the path you’ve just crafted. What’s worse is that it just felt cynical more than anything else, and even worse than that is the way it’ll purposely disadvantage you if you veer off the path they want you to take, to the point that one level will essentially wipe out your entire squad if you don’t do as the developers tell you. Don’t give me the option to pick a path through a level if you’re not going to actually accomodate my choices and then force me onto certain paths; I’d feel far less annoyed about the experience if you were just upfront about putting me on rails rather than hoping I wouldn’t notice the parrot you’ve sold me isn’t pining for the fjords.

Another cardinal sin the Anomaly commits is putting a checkpoint just before a block of unskippable dialogue. It’d be understandable if you quit out of the game mid-mission to come back to it later on and needed bringing up to speed, but if you do leave the game for any reason you’ll have to start the mission from the very beginning, making it all the more frustrating. Anomaly also resets your path to a default after checkpoints as well, which serves to only waste more of your time between restarting and getting back into the action.

I’ve spent a fair chunk of time talking about what Anomaly does wrong, so what exactly does it do right?  Well, the element of strategy is quite integral when you look past how much the game limits your movement path. In terms of units and the abilities you employ, you’ll find there’s plenty of room for experimentation, as I found I’d end up using my suit abilities completely differently depending on what units I had deployed. Eventually you’ll find yourself settling with layouts that work out for you, and it feels quite satisfying to lay waste to the opposition in your way as everything falls into place. If the action is going too slow then Anomaly allows you to speed up the proceedings at the push of a button, which comes in useful when you’re just mopping up the stragglers and want to get to the end, but is a massive risk if you’re heading into the unknown. It also speeds up those unskippable dialogues, but opts to just cut their sentences off rather than speed the voices up, which I can’t help but feel is a missed opportunity, although not a massive grievance.

Another great plus is the fact that the game doesn’t have to end when the main story mode is over. After beating certain points in the campaign, the player can unlock modes that are essentially Anomaly’s equivalent of horde mode, but with a twist. Baghdad Mayhem keeps you on one map as you have to move from wave to wave in the quickest and most devastating way possible, and while it becomes samey rather quickly it’s a great way to practice tactics and experiment. Tokyo Raid is by far the more interesting mode, albeit much harder. Giving the player eighteen consecutive waves in the form of islands to be traversed will prove to be a challenge to both your endurance and your patience, but each wave gives you a different variation of “kill everything in front of you”, and ended up being possibly my favourite part of the game. Once you’ve completed the campaign you’ll unlock the rearmed version of Baghdad Mayhem, but it didn’t grip me as much as Tokyo Raid did. Also of particular note were the extra missions that took away your squad commander and the ability to change your path and put all the strategy into units used and your ability to swap their positions on the fly; these showed how much extra potential existed within the game’s mechanics and concept which the developers thankfully chose to explore.

It’s difficult to decide where I stand with Anomaly: Warzone Earth. I love the way that the game takes the tower defence genre and does something brilliantly unique with it, and I think there’s plenty to admire in terms of variety in the additional modes and the way that it builds on the tired horde mode to give it fresh life. However, I don’t love the lacklustre story, voice acting, or writing; nor the unskippable dialogues and occasionally poor checkpointing, or the fact that the game seems so intent on wrestling choice away from you that you wonder why it gave you the illusion that there was any in the first place. What makes those issues worse is that some of them feel as if they could have easily been averted but were simply ignored, which makes it harder for me to do likewise. If you find yourself able to get past the flaws, there’s an amazingly fresh take on the Tower Defence genre here, but it’s one with a fair few cracks in the walls.

Well, someone at Red Redemption must have eventually asked that question because last year they released Fate of the World, which tasks the player with preventing Earth’s devastation from climate change. Think ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, but without the backing of a former US Vice President. The game is instead backed by a number of foundations, including Oxfam, TckTckTck, TakingITGlobal and the University of Oxford, and later released more content in the form of DLC that has now been collated and re-released as ‘Fate of the World: Tipping Point’.

Fate of the World is best described as an educational turn-based strategy card game.  The player is given a series of different scenarios that they can tackle, whereupon they will have to cater to the needs of twelve regions and do their best not to mess everything up. Each turn, you’ll be able to deploy up to six agents per nation and use those agents to activate cards of your choosing for each individual one. Each agent and card costs money to deploy and some cards will either take a turn to activate, or remain active in that region until such time as you deactivate it. You’ll be given an inbox for each region, filled with news as well as what you’ve been doing right or wrong and what problems you’ll need to tackle, with support for your actions either rising or dropping depending on how well you adhere to their needs. You’ll also have to install offices in each region to control environmental measures, what technological advances should be made, improve the people’s standard of living, or even send in the army to stop war breaking out. You’ll also be able to install a HQ that allows you to affect everywhere you have agents installed, granting you the ability to enact global measures like banning fossil fuels or even launching a space programme to find a way off this stinking rock.

After the tutorial, you’ll feel more than ready to take on the scourge of climate change… and then the stabilisers fall off your bike and you crash head first into a giant wall with ‘difficulty curve’ written on it in big letters. I’m no good at similes. The thing is, the tutorial only puts you in charge of two regions and only introduces you to a few of the mechanics you’ll need to understand to play the game somewhat decently. Every level afterwards requires you to keep an eye on all twelve nations, and that’s not even the half of it. You’ll need to keep a track of their HDI, their economy, energy usage, forestation, political stability, technological progress, their satisfaction with what you’re doing, and that’s still not all. You’ll need to build up defences against consequences of climate change, make sure everybody is working, prevent any economic crises from occurring, and constantly monitor temperature rises, emissions, fuel supplies, making sure that you have your eyes on all this and more at the same time, on top of whatever the win and fail conditions of each level demand you do or not do. It’s like finding a needle in a haystack, then asking you to repeat the task but in the Grand Canyon instead. The overall difficulty is like you’re David and the game is Goliath and you’re only allowed to fight him with mushy peas, but your peashooter is broken and you’re naked and your ex-girlfriend is laughing at you. Too much? Okay, the game is truly, incredibly difficult.

It’s not just the extent of the micromanagement you have to undertake, it’s also that success in the game relies so much on trial and error that you can often feel at a loss of what to do, and sometimes you may feel forced to depart from plans you’d like to enact by several turns just to make sure no one kicks you out of a region.  Should this happen, it means you’ll no longer get money from them or interact with them for a number of turns, meaning that it’ll be an even bigger uphill struggle to get things on track when they eventually let you back in. Some regions will start the levels actively protesting against you, and it will get often get to the point where you’ll just find yourself rolling your eyes at the fact that your progres has been slowed yet again by people that seem almost impossible to make happy.

Admittedly, this may make you feel less guilty about some of the Black Ops you can fund. Governments aren’t supporting you? Fund some terrorist groups to destabilise the land and replace the opposing politicians with some yes men. Overpopulation causing famine, lack of housing and ridiculous rates of unemployment? Covertly sterilise everytone and drop birth rates to a sustainable level. Sick of everyone and feel like wiping them out and starting all over? Unleash plagues designed to wipe out a quarter, half, or ninety-nine percent of the population. Enacting them means that there’s a risk you’ll get caught and probably kicked out, but it adds yet another dynamic to the playing field as long as you’re feeling a little amoral.

While you may find yourself justifying such tactics in one mission it doesn’t necessarily mean you will in another, because while Fate of the World will normally fail you if you’re banned from too many places or the temperature of the Earth rises too much, the other objectives you’re given will completely change the way you approach each situation. Tactics you’d employ when trying to keep the world’s temperatures down go out of the window when you’re told to make as much money as you possibly can, or when every nation starts out already environmentally friendly. The variety of the mission structures are something that’ll keep you coming back and trying again, as well as the fact that you’ll be given a score for how well you’ve performed, provided you can even succeed in the first place.

This is where I have to make a horrible confession: I was actually unable to complete any of the missions beyond the tutorial. You know when I said the game was hard? Fate of the World kicked my arse seven ways to Sunday. One of my many playthroughs resulted in disaster when my next turn led me to get banned from two regions who were supportive of me the turn before, which turned out to be the least of my worries as I was then told I’d failed the level anyway because I’d been assassinated. On easy mode. But do you know what?  I still enjoyed playing Fate of the World.

At the time of writing, I have over thirty-five Firefox tabs up with various pages of information, tactics and forum threads full of people discussing the game, just in the vain hope that if I try reading them in another hour then I’ll understand what people are talking about this time. I’ve come out of a university lecture having learnt absolutely nothing because I was plotting my next Fate of the World playthrough instead. Most of my daydreaming of late has been about some aspect of the game in the hope that the next attempt will bring more success. I can literally spend up to ten minutes agonising over a single turn in the fear I’m going to do something wrong and screw the world over yet again. Despite the fact that I’m staring at cards and spreadsheets over an unchanging background to annoyingly repetitive music for hours on end, most of my thoughts keep coming back to this game. I’m not sure if playing it has given me some form of Stockholm Syndrome, but the first thing I want to do as soon as I’ve finished typing is to load it up and try again.

On one hand, Fate of the World is one of the hardest games I’ve ever had to play, and it’s the only game I’ve ever reviewed for GamingLives that I’ve been unable to finish. On the other hand, it’s unique, addictive, and manages to be fun despite being an educational title. If you’re not a hardcore strategist who is willing to pour over stats, graphs and plan several moves ahead, you will find this game a struggle, but what Red Redemption have done is made an educational game that is well worth playing, regardless of your views on global warming.

Fortunately, we’ve been able to get our hands on some of the enemy’s short term plans, but beyond the first quarter we’re looking at a potentially apocalyptic situation, and I’m not just saying that because of the Mayans! Our enemy has managed to create weapons so powerful, so infinitely destructive that we may potentially lose our free time forever!  Like many of you soldiers, I normally spend the first few months working through the backlog of red tape from the end of the year before, but I fear the enemy have gotten word of this, as the forces of evil have launched an assault unlike any they have before. I’ve received word that the first foe on our shores will be Final Fantasy XIII-2, and while some of us may have been turned off by the original, I know there are plenty of men in these ranks who’ll go nuts for the time travel storyline and the hours upon hours of gameplay. The sequels don’t stop either, with General Patton returning for The Darkness 2 – careful with this one men, it may look less intimidating than the original, but don’t dare underestimate it or we’ll be seeing quite a few of us lose heart come February. Literally.

It may feel like some of these titles are creeping up on you, or in the case of Resident Evil Revelations, shambling towards you to chew your skull, that’s natural. Just be sure that if any of the opposing forces happen to be from Ghost Recon: Future Soldier that you collect their technology so that we can reverse engineer it and use it against them. Teamwork will be crucial, as will the ability to turn invisible, but I better not catch any of you using it to sneak into the women’s quarters again or it’ll be a court martial. Besides, you might find it more useful to apply that technology to the world of corporate takeovers in Syndicate, though I’m afraid we won’t be able to supply you with your own Danny Dyer.

They’re all small fry compared to what comes after, and the launch of Mass Effect 3 is one I know we’re all excited about. We’ve been battling those Reapers for a good five years now, and I know we all can’t wait to see the back of them, but I can’t help feel that some of you are more interested in your private relationships than the fate of the galaxy. Rest assured, I better find you all on the battlefield rather than a bed come March, or the Reapers won’t be the only immediate threat to your danger.

After March is where our information gets a little… sketchier. While we have a decent idea of what fiendish tricks the industry has up its sleeves, we’re less sure of when exactly they’re planning to launch them. By then, the enemy will have unleashed their latest time-killing device, the Playstation Vita. While many of us have had our eyes on that beauty for what seems like a while, we may still have a chance against it, as sales languished horribly against our Japanese allies after the first week. I can’t promise that we’ll be totally safe, what with it coming with it’s own Uncharted title and boasting a library that’ll threaten us even on the go, but we can only hope. Where true danger may start to lie is with the Nintendo 3DS, which may finally start bringing out some bigger guns to lay siege to our forces on the move, with the deadly Kid Icarus, Snake Eater, Luigi’s Mansion 2 and Paper Mario 3DS ready to attack throughout the year. Don’t be fooled into thinking it’s just a portable assault either, as there’s still the enigma of the Wii U to consider. Will it be a flash in the pan? Will it be the biggest revolution in gaming since motion controls and touch screens? How do you even play it anyway? I guess there’s no way to know until E3.

Now, you should all know how important E3 is for us; it’s our chief opportunity to find out what’s approaching throughout the second half of the year and the year beyond. With the Wii U approaching and rumours of a new Microsoft console, it may be easy to forgot there’s still a barrage of titles that will be gearing up for attack, which E3 will be all too eager to expose, as well as some extra wonders we hadn’t anticipated. Where else will we discover when Desmond’s next adventures in the Assassin’s Creed series will be, or when Gearbox will wow us all again with Borderlands 2 and Aliens: Colonial Marines… Gamescom? Well yes, there too.

So what else is there to prepare against that we know of? Well, Valve are planning on staging a coup against FPS players everywhere with Counterstrike: GO in the future, and are stretching their dominance out towards the RTS franchise with Dota 2′s release, to boot. Max Payne is going bald and badass on us in Rockstar’s third instalment of the franchise, whilst Square-Enix prepare to unleash Agent 47 in Hitman Absolution and send Lara Croft back to the beginning in Tomb Raider.

Ubisoft are planning to welcome us back to the jungle with Far Cry 3, Alien Noir will become a thing when Prey 2 arrives, and we move out of Rapture and into the skies with Bioshock Infinite.  South Park is getting its own RPG, Halo is making a grand return later in the year, Metal Gear Rising Revengeance is planning on taking the award of “Worst Name of the Year”, and Blizzard are releasing the triple threat of Diablo III, WoW’s Mists of Pandaria and Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm.

*takes a deep breath*

And those are just a few of the titles that we know are coming this year. There have been plenty I haven’t even mentioned, tons yet to be revealed, and two new consoles being released.  There’s simply too much!  Soldiers, I gathered here not just to warn you about the impending threat, but to make you realise something that may chill you to the bone: we may not be able to play all the games this year.

There are just simply too many games coming out this year for us to take on by ourselves. Even if we ignore all the modern concessions we face, such as DLC designed to keep us playing the story after it’s finished, or map packs to coerce us into playing another round of multiplayer, and even those damn Horde modes, there’d still be far too much to play. Attempting to do so would be madness, and succeeding may well destroy us. Some of us may have to think carefully about what they want to play this year, and pick and choose as they see fit, and maybe make some sacrifices, but that doesn’t mean that some of us still can’t try.  Just remember this:  they may take all of our free time and money, but I’m (reasonably) sure they can never take our freedom!  DISMISSED!

As has been previously established, I have access to a Time Machine. However, it only follows that it can only go back as far as to when it was created, and can only travel as far as to when the machine stops existing. Now, while I’ve been using the Time Machine to boost my internet credibility to bring you reviews of games… from the future… handling all the fame I presumably have by now is undoubtedly going to be an arduous task.

Crowds gather in Berlin's Tiergarten as iconic gaming effigies are set alight. Toxic fumes followed.

As is customary for anyone who has had the tiniest bit of fame, and therefore thinks that they’re super important and that what they say matters, I’m going to pretend that this somehow gives me the right to preach my views and tell you how to live your lives. As GamingLives’ self imposed Bono, it’s now my job to tell you about the horrors of things and then make you feel like you have to take action over something I could easily help solve myself with my fat sacks of cash if I wasn’t such a massive hypocrite by putting my money in Dutch bank accounts to avoid paying higher taxes. So, while I board one of my three private jets to one of my seven homes, I’m going to tell you about something terrible that happens in the future.

While we know of the censorship that hits videogames in Germany, it’s probably harder to live with that if you’re an actual videogamer actually living in actual Germany. I come to you with a warning from the future thanks to my good friend Jan (Jack) Klama, who documented what happened to him and had it delivered to me so I could send it back to the past to warn everyone (and also gain mad e-cred). My future self also saw fit to review some of the games mentioned in the article to reduce the distress caused by the horrors detailed. His words are in italics, while mine are not.

An actual German gamer

Hello World, it’s me again, Jack. Maybe you remember me, I once helped Edward with his radio show… good old times. My last few days were pretty hard and I’m glad I’m still alive. I wrote down my experiences to warn the world, to show the madness that’s going on in the country that used to be my home. Don’t listen to the media, they’re lying! This is the future of videogaming in Germany.

It all began with the release of “Gears Of War 3”. After the extreme censorship of “Bioshock 3” and the following Great Internet War, German gamers were tired of all this censorship madness, but the German government didn’t care. On the day of the European “Gears of War 3” release they closed down all videogame stores, privatized them and started to release their own games like “Growing Grass” and the add-on “Watering Fun Time – Now with even MORE Photosynthesis!”. It was horrible; I still have to throw up when I think about it. “Animal Hugger” needed a major update since some animals seemed to have overly sharp claws.

Growing Grass II
This was a major hit among young people indoctrinated by the government, as well as old people who didn’t know any better. While it improved on many of the problems of the first edition of Growing Grass, many felt that it was in fact as much fun as watching paint dry. However, Growing Grass II was met with a lot of controversy when it was discovered that you were able to kill insects with insecticides. The Government finally pulled the game to stop the violence and to protect the children. The original artwork was banned for being too racy (which you can see in the enlargement to the right) and was replaced by the less offensive ‘ladybird’ cover. The German Government gave out free bug zappers to everyone that summer.

The top 3 video games chart in Germany just before the wars looked like this:

3: “Walk Pro”
2: “Paint That Wall”
1: “Conversation Simulator”
(These charts are obviously faked by the government.)

Walk Pro
This was a big hit among those aiming to keep fit. It involved a converted dance mat and a pedometer in order to keep track of how much walking you did. The aim was to walk so much that you’d become the Walk Pro. However, the game was not without issue, as it didn’t really do that much to keep you fit. When confronted with said accusations, the makers of the game told people to “It’s the exact same thing as walking in real life!”. Some felt it was just rewards when the game was eventually pulled because it was possible to trample grass and plants in the game, killing them in the process. The kids that were sent outside as a punishment spent most of their free time trying to set fire to ants with magnifying glasses.

The gamers weren’t amused at all. We first tried to get our games by importing them from other countries but that became illegal very quickly. The police raided my house and destroyed my PC, consoles and all my videogames. I’m shivering when I think of the way that policeman stepped on my copy of “GTA: Moonbase Mayhem”. After that we started demonstrations to show our force.

We stood united to show the world we wouldn’t take it anymore. It was peaceful at first, but then we got attacked by the military. Street riots everywhere, smoke grenades versus cobbles, water cannons versus Molotov cocktails, German versus German. It was horrible; I never saw so much blood, not even in “Resident Evil 7”. And I don’t mean pixelblood, I mean real, warm human blood. All of my German Steam buddies died in this one last, big fight. Rest in peace H34d*HuNt3R, rest in peace…

Paint That Wall!
Yet another instant casual classic, Paint That Wall! swept the charts and took a long time to be dislodged from the number one spot. You played a series of different painters from various nationalities, trying to paint as many walls as you could within a given time. Critics slammed it, saying that it was about as interesting and fun as watching grass grow, however it generated a lot of controversy when the German Government falsely believed that children would be able to sniff the fumes and chemicals from the game in order to get high. Impressionable, and disappointed, kids therefore sniffed glue instead and ended up with sticky noses.

The game, as well as its developers, Tedium, somehow even managed to get past the controversy over the fact that certain immigrants in the game would spend a lot of time waiting for the paint to dry, and it could have been considered as an offensive jibe or insinuation that immigrants were lazy.

Outlawed poster, German and English versions

Similar outcries were heard when a cheat was discovered whereby opting to play as a Polish contractor would bring about a 10% increase in speed, cited as an “unfair advantage”, resulting in an emergency meeting at the Reichstag where it was demanded that all Poles be removed immediately, at whatever cost.

Those issues didn’t cause the game to be banned. What did, however, was when the marketing department at Tedium created that, now famous, “Missing The Wall?” campaign petitioning for a giant wall to be built in Berlin for people to paint. Shown to the left are the English and German posters, rescued from a boarded up store front on Kurfürstendamm.

I survived and fleed to Austria.
It wasn’t easy to get here; the military was after me, they tried to kill the leftovers and hide any evidence. I had to hide in the woods, but thank god I had my Nintendo DSi XXL Deluxe Premium Super Mega Beamer Edition with me. I was able to hide it in… well I was able to hide it. After almost two weeks of running and hiding I made it over the Austrian border, dirty and exhausted. A nice farmer helped me by harbouring me and telling me how to get to Vienna. And I tell you, it’s like the gamer’s paradise here. Censorship? Nowhere! Overpriced games? Are you kidding? When I entered a videogame store I hugged the seller and told him “I love you man, I love you.”. After being kicked out of there I went to the next internet café and wrote this, since I knew that Edward had this time machine thing he always talked of.

Conversation Simulator
A shockingly addictive game that became one of the best selling games in Germany. Ever. The game allowed you to actually converse with people as if you were actually there, actually talking to them. It soon overtook real conversations and all other forms of communication, despite being heavily based on the Facebook chat system used in your present time. It came under heavy fire as it was possible to have arguments with people, especially in the multiplayer mode, and was eventually pulled after causing real life violence due to how frustrating and utterly broken it was. Shortly thereafter, people resumed using the internet and mobile phones to communicate with each other whilst still avoiding all conversation in real life.

So that was the story of Jan Klama, and how he coped in a dystopian future ruled by government censorship with a major bias against videogames. But it doesn’t have to be this way. By donating money to GamingLives’ special charity “The GamingLives Charity To Stop Things From Happening That May Happen One Day, Maybe”, you help make sure that we’ll probably think about getting around to perhaps try and solve the problem eventually. Your money happiness is very important to us. I’ll leave you with some final choice words by Jan.

People of the past, listen good! Videogaming isn’t a crime, even if the old people tell you so. Play your videogames with pride, rise your controllers to show that you’re here. It’s not important what party you belong to, if it’s Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony or any other one. Feel the united pride – the pride of Gamers.
Jan Klama.

“Fuck this”, I thought. “Someone else can save the world today.”

I sometimes find myself approaching sequels with a great deal of hesitance. Not because I’m one of those annoying elitists who feel that sequels should never exist, but because, for the most part, no matter how good the sequel may be, they’ll always run into a stumbling block right from the outset: newcomers. Judging by how often sequels tend to outsell the original, it’s apparently too much effort to expect people to play the original before diving in, and instead of telling the kids with the armbands to get out of the deep end of the pool, some developers seem all too keen to encourage them. I guess you have to if you need the game to sell, but I wouldn’t skip A New Hope and start the trilogy at Empire Strikes Back and act put out that it wasn’t accommodating me. Most games will readily do this by forcing the beginning of every sequel to act as an extended tutorial, but some games do something I consider far worse and, in some instances, unforgivable: completely stripping you of everything you gained in the last game and sticking you back at square one.

One man who doesn't need the 'Bad Ass' upgrade...

Maybe the developers didn’t originally expect to make a sequel, or maybe it’s been shipped off to a different company in the vain pursuit of money, or maybe everyone recently suffered brain trauma after an office-wide freak accident, but rather than make a game that keeps all the abilities your character gained and build upon them, it’s apparently far more simple and accessible to throw all the character development out of the window and start anew every time, no matter how little it fits. I don’t mean games like Nathan Drake’s incredibly lucky adventures in genocide, sans lesson learning (aka, the Uncharted series), or typically many third or first person shooters, as they simply give you a set of base abilities and find increasingly ludicrous reasons to take away most of your weapons between each level (or cut-scene, if it’s feeling particularly evil that day). I mean games that all serve to fit part of a greater story, and throw all of your toys out of the pram between each instalment.

I mean games like the Metroid series. Each title essentially serves as a different part of the canon, but there are three games in particular that not only take the piss, but put it in a bowl, serve it back to you and call it soup. The first offender is probably the lightest; you start the opening section with enough abilities to reach the boss, but then the game decides that your fun ends there with an explosion that is simultaneously weak enough not to injure Samus Aran in any significant way, but strong enough to completely destroy parts of her suit and disable half of the abilities you’ve just spent the last half an hour growing accustomed to. Instead of calling someone and getting her suit fixed or, better yet, refunded for faulty manufacture, she then decides to fly straight to the planet she’s just seen her nemesis land on. If it wasn’t for the fact that she just so happens to coincidentally come across all of her power-ups and then some whilst exploring the planet, that would have ended up being the most ill advised plan since the Nazis decided to take on Russia wearing summer clothes.

Metroid Prime 2: Echoes is worse still. Samus crash lands on a distant planet to investigate missing Galactic Federation troopers, which turns out to be a stroke of bad luck when they’re all dead and there’s an evil version of the famous bounty hunter casually strolling into a portal. Rather than take in her surroundings or call for backup, she decides to jump through the portal without a second thought, whereupon she is immediately ambushed by strange creatures that somehow manage to steal all of her important weapons and abilities she’d gained from the previous game.

Hope you enjoy slowly recovering your abilities by taking on progressively more irritating boss battles, because that’s what you’re going to spend more than half of the goddamn game trying to do.  Considering how many ideas the game employs with the light and dark mechanic, getting rid of most of your abilities at the start is just a dick move. It doesn’t make me feel more powerful when I can finally surpass an obstacle, it makes me irritated that it shouldn’t even have been an obstacle in the first place. It doesn’t give the player power, it just reminds them how much they were neutered in the first place.

The absolute worst offender in the series – and indeed, in all of my years of gaming – undoubtedly lies with Metroid: Other M. Team Ninja didn’t so much take the reins of the series from Nintendo as much as it yanked them off, took a baseball bat to the legs and sent it back to Nintendo to be put down. Taking place immediately after Super Metroid, by this point you’d expect Samus to lose her powers after tripping up on a particularly tricky flight of stairs, but even that was too classy for Team Ninja. You see, after Samus goes to investigate the latest macguffin, she comes across a squad of soldiers led by her old commanding officer, who appears reluctant to let our heroine tag along, and not least because she’s voiced by someone who appears to have taken a shovel to the back of her head. The only way he’ll let her help them out is if… (okay, you need to take a deep breath for this one. Trust me. Breath taken? Ready?) …she deactivates all of her suit’s abilities until he personally gives her the okay to use any of them.

Fucking… what?!

That’s not giving players an entry level to the mechanics and making way for newcomers, that’s insultingly patronising, and it helps destroy the perception of Samus’ character entirely. She’s supposed to be the most dangerous threat to the Space Pirates in the Galaxy, not a whiny, self-narrating brain damage victim! She’s saved you all from Metroids countless times, but she can’t help you out and prevent your men from dying until she deactivates any ability that’d help save the day until you’re comfortable with it?

As soon as Samus complied with his demands rather than shooting a missile up his arse to assist him in his grand task of fucking himself, I put the game down and never touched it again. Had I seen that cut-scene when I previewed it, I’d never have wasted my money on what amounts to nothing more than an expensive and insulting paperweight. Rest assured, I hope that commanding officer dies.

It could just be something about the sci-fi setting, as I even found myself getting frustrated with Mass Effect 2. Considering how much of your character and their actions were taken over from the first in the series, I couldn’t help but find myself more than a little disappointed when I was able to look at my Shepard’s stats and found that none of them had transferred into the sequel. Gone was my smooth talking, shotgun specialising sentinel powerhouse Shepard, and instead was a guy I felt like I hardly knew any more.  All those points I’d put into being able to charm or intimidate people instead became a one-sided affair, depending on whether Shepard was a Paragon or Renegade. My biotic abilities were no more powerful than the day Shepard became a Spectre. Seeing as they managed to carry over so much from one game to another, it feels like a petty squabble as much as it does a legitimate grievance; I can still shape my Shepard the way I want him to be, but would I have spent so much time carefully debating what stat to upgrade next had I known it wouldn’t matter when the sequel landed?

Am I just over-thinking all of this? Am I demanding too much of the industry to expect them to build on their characters and their powers, rather than just resetting them for each new instalment?  To force designers to think of some new obstacles for the characters to overcome, rather than find more contrived reasons to face the same ones in a different landscape? Maybe I’m just making a huge fuss over nothing. I guess we’ll find out next time, when I somehow lose my ability to write and have to spend half the article slowly regaining my ability to put words in a coherent order.  I bet you can’t wait.

Time to thwack off. Ahem.

I’ll level with you. I’ve never been the biggest fan of golf. Despite all of my father’s attempts to get me into the sport, it didn’t ever really fascinate me. It’s not very interesting to play, and watching it is usually enough to bore me into a coma. Golf isn’t exactly a pick up and play sport either, and not many people are going to have the time and patience to start caring about the difference between a pitching wedge and a lob wedge. On the whole, golf games tend to provide nearly the same amount of boredom and tedium, only with less walking.  With that in mind, what if I told you there was a golf game where the player travels to the ball via teleport? Where sheep roamed the courses and your ball could suddenly open a parachute before hitting an old lady or causing a pirate to explode? What if the golfers also happened to be worms?  Enter Team17′s Worms Crazy Golf, where it’s not the size of your club, but how you use it.

As you start the game, you can choose to go with a previously created Worm, or generate one of your own. Even though there’s something fun about creating your own character with an appropriately terrible worm-based pun in their name, they can all be customised extensively and can all use items that another worm unlocks. What ends up being one of the more important customisation decisions is how you swing: ‘Classic Worms’, or ‘Classic Golf’. The former option relies on the player to hold down the shot command and let go when the power gauge is at the desired spot, and the latter has you pressing once to start swinging, and again to let rip. It’s important to see which option best suits your style, but I found that the ‘Golf’ option generally provided more accuracy and precision overall, which is all important if you don’t want to screw up your shot.

Each swing you line up will display the ball’s projected arc, and the further up the gauge the power goes, the more accurate the resulting shot will be. The challenge lies in making sure that you don’t end up accidentally hitting the red, as your worm will have then spectacularly wasted their shot. Between each red zone is the ‘Overdrive’ – an all-powerful shot that can send the ball flying further than it could before, but at a slight cost to accuracy. Learning how to master the power gauge will be one of the three most important tasks ahead of you as you progress. The second of those is spinning the ball; as soon as you’ve made your swing you can start controlling the amount of top or backspin on the ball. While it can make a difference to the shot in the air, it’s how you control it when the ball begins to land, with some of the most tense moments in the game coming from frantically spinning the ball towards the hole and hoping it’ll fall in. I often found that I was tilting myself in the direction of the hole, but apparently doing that while muttering under your breath doesn’t actually help.

The third important task you have ahead of you is mastering the utilities. As you progress through each course, your golfer will slowly find themselves unlocking more of them, and getting to grips with them can often be the difference between scraping a par or breezing your way to a hole in one. You’ll start off with the ability to slow time, and soon gain access to the blast shot, which allows you to launch the ball in the air again, the self explanatory parachute, reverse gravity and heavy ball, with the Carnival DLC providing the bouncy ball. Better still, once you’ve unlocked each utility, they’re available for all previous holes, too. Each hole lets the player use each utility for up to ten seconds, or five times for the blast shot. Learning when best to use each one adds an extra layer of strategy that realistic golfing games can’t provide and makes the experience that much more fun. The main problem that can occur is that, if anything, the utilities make some holes too easy, and once you know what you’re doing the normally elusive hole-in-one can become a mere triviality.

Once that happens, the main challenge will come from trying to destroy the crates found on every hole. Doing so will allow the player to unlock a variety of different hats, balls and sound-banks to customise their worms with, though it should be mentioned that not every crate collected will yield a new trinket to play with. Nor will it give you immediate access to whatever you’ve unlocked, as you’ll then need to buy the item with the coins you’ll get from completing each hole, and the ones you’ll find scattered across them.

You should be warned, however, especially in the early stages, going for the crates will often mean having to abandon passing the hole, and going for all the coins will probably keep you trapped even longer; thankfully, the game remembers the coins and crates you’ve collected, which saves you a lot of potential frustration in the long term. However, unless you’re aiming to get a hundred percent on every course, you’ll soon find yourself giving up on trying to collect all of the coins, as you’ll always get more from simply completing the holes, and completing each course will give you more than you’ll know what to do with. I found myself giving up on the coins altogether and simply trying to collect the crates instead.

At the start of the game you’ll find yourself only able to access the Britannia course, which does plenty to slowly ease you into the different mechanics, but as you progress you’ll eventually unlock courses themed around pirates and graveyards and, if you have the DLC, a carnival. Each course may look different, but for the most part the changes are purely cosmetic; bunkers will become piles of gold or graves, groundskeepers will wear pirate hats or giant pumpkins, and warp points will change from castles to creepy clown faces. It’s compounded by the fact that some obstacles, like the sheep and the old ladies, will turn up on more than one course. It leaves the feeling that a lot of the holes are ultimately interchangeable, especially when the graveyard course felt much easier than the pirate one, despite being the following course. Admittedly, my favourite is a close tie between the graveyard and the carnival; both feel inventive, are a pleasure to play, and give a great sense of accomplishment when you manage to nab the crate and score a hole-in-one on the same attempt.

As for the unlockables, you’ll find the standard Worms fare of a variety of sound-banks and hats, as well as the traditional golfing gubbins of additional clubs and ball patterns. While it’s reasonably fun collecting a variety of hats to adorn your worms with, the sound-banks felt slightly disappointing in comparison to other games in the series, as there are far fewer phrases and they are repeated quite often; they also cost much more than they should. Where your coins should ideally go is into different clubs, as while the standard clubs are fine for the first course, you’ll soon find that some of the other clubs on offer may suit your style more. Each type of club has several variations to choose from, with some focusing more on power, accuracy or control than others. They may seem expensive at first, but they’ll pay in dividends as you progress, though admittedly I was able to buy all of the second-best clubs in the game after beating the Britannia course, and found those were the best clubs on balance than any others I later bought.

As you progress throughout each course, you’ll also unlock several challenges that you can test your skills with, from eliminating sheep and bats in Time Attack, to trying to chip in as many shots as you can or get the ball as close to the hole as possible, or keeping the ball airborne as long as you can. While they can help the player experiment using the various utilities and hone their skills for the courses, I couldn’t help but feel that a couple of the challenges were inconsistent. Despite several attempts, I couldn’t understand how the target mode was scored, and found that I could rack up more than enough points on the Keep Up challenges by just driving the ball to the sky with a full overdrive shot and switching on reserve gravity.

Here is a good place to pick up on several other flaws in Worms Crazy Golf that tend to become more evident through playing the challenges. Sometimes the cannons will fire the ball with your utility power activated and it can mess up several shots if you’re not prepared for it. At the very least, an option to toggle it would pay dividends, rather than be slightly disruptive.  Sometimes the game’s difficulty seems skewed towards actively punishing you for bad shots, and the physics of the courses will often feel like they’re forcing the ball to end up in a position that disadvantages you. This reached a hilarious level when I was about to par a course when the ball landed in mid air just beside the hole, and forced me to restart the level to pass, though I will point out that the incident was the only time the game glitched out on me. Still, these are just minor complaints and occur very rarely in comparison to the camera. The camera is a constant issue throughout the entire game, and you’ll rarely ever feel like you can see enough to take a shot without having to zoom out as far as you can go. Even worse, the view resets after every shot and having to correct it slowly becomes the default first step before every shot. The fact that there’s no option to fix the position or level of zoom means that eventually the camera slowly becomes the game’s biggest flaw.

Those looking for more some multiplayer delights will find themselves with a local only hot-seat version. You’ll each pick a player, decide how exactly you’ll approach a course, whether it be individual holes, several at a time or the whole course, and then battle it out for supremacy. Both sides have to play through the hole in their entirety before passing it on, and the winner is the player who ends up furthest below par. Unfortunately, there’s very little else I can say about it other than that it’s simply same experience as the single player, but that you can involve your friends too. That is by no means a criticism; the main game is more than enjoyable enough to stand on its own in a multiplayer context, and any potential frustration you’ll find on some of the harder holes will be alleviated by the tension that’ll soon replace it.

If you’re lacking in friends, you’ll find that Worms Crazy Golf has more than enough content to keep you occupied. By the time I’d made my way through all of the courses and challenges, Steam cheerfully reminded me that I’d been playing the game for ten hours and had unlocked all but two of the achievements and all but one of the collectables. That’s not including all the time I invested in the iOS version when my father wasn’t looking. Fundamentally, there’s very little difference between the two versions, other than the opposing keyboard and touch screen control scheme and the available content – the Carnival DLC comes free on the Steam version, but is available at an extra cost for iOS.

Where you side will come down to preference, though I have to admit that if I wasn’t playing it for review, I’d probably have savoured Worms Crazy Golf as a pick up and play title I could enjoy on short journeys, simply so I’d eventually have a reason to put it down. Honestly, I had no idea I’d spent as long as I did playing it on Steam, and there’s still more for me to do should I wish to go back to it; there are still some challenges I’d like to pass, some crates left to collect and some holes ready to be conquered in a single swing. There’s a lot more content than you’d initially think, and it’s all too easy to load the game up for a quick five minutes and come out an hour later. Worms and golf may seem like an odd combination, but it is one that ends up being far more enjoyable than you’d ever think it would be.

Available for the PC, PSN and XBLA, Worms Ultimate Mayhem isn’t strictly a new title; rather, it’s a ‘best of’ compilation of Worms 3D and Worms 4, packaged into a single download. Rather than call it a day at that though, Team17 dove back in and fixed several problems that plagued the originals to bring a more refined experience. Your worms are now silhouetted when behind objects, there’s a picture in picture view showing the path of your projectiles, Binoculars and aim assists now exist to help slowly accustom players to the new dimension, and there’s now a narrator who introduces the story missions and challenges from Worms 4: Mayhem.

Jumping into worm-related carnage in the third dimension is something some players may not be familiar with, and to help alleviate any potential issues the game opens with a narrator and a film encouraging you to check out the tutorials and visit the options menu to customise some worms. It’s something I had to check out, and you’ll find that it does well to ease you in and make you feel more adept at handling everything in a 3D environment, though no longer being on a 2D plane does change the game more than you’d think.

Worms: Ultimate Mayhem still has destructible environments, as the levels are created with something Team17 termed “poxels” – essentially a hybrid of polygons and voxels which allow the environments to be deformed in the same manner as the two dimensional games. It also gives the game a rather brilliant graphical style that hasn’t noticeably aged since since the games were originally released. Those expecting to be able to employ defensive tactics like drilling into the environment and blocking the entrance with girders (not that I’d encourage that behaviour… against me) may find themselves having to reassess tactics, as the pneumatic drills and blowtorches are gone, allowing for more dynamic and offensive matches. There’s still a lot of strategy to be had in employing the landscape to your advantage, and on some maps it’s even more important than before if you want to get to the end of the battle with all your worms left alive.

One brilliant thing about the game is just how customisable your versus experiences can be. On top of the massive amount of maps the player can unlock through natural progression, those which have a more generic theme can be randomised and come with a code that can be noted if you want to use that exact arena again. It makes for a great touch and it means that there are so many more combinations of environments the player can have on top of the standard maps available, and if those don’t tickle your fancy you can create your own landscapes.

Customisation doesn’t end there, because on top of the randomly generated terrain available there’s also something called the “Wormpot”.  This is a slot machine which, upon activation, comes up with three alterations to the standard match set-up and adds another element of strategy. How do you play when you’re no longer able to use the overhead view to further plan your actions? Is the baseball bat now a more viable weapon to use because of the game’s low gravity? How do you protect the VIP worm, knowing his demise means your team loses? Having alterations to the match formula isn’t something worms veterans will be unfamiliar with, but the Wormpot allows that process to become more randomised than considered, though if you disagree with the set-up you can spin again or change them individually.

Those somehow finding themselves disappointed with the massive selection of weapons or wanting to put their own personal spin on invertebrate annihilation can find that they’re also able to create their own, from projectiles to new homing devices and alternative air-strikes.  From that starting point, you can change everything from its appearance to if it’s affected by the wind, if it deals poison damage and how much blast damage it deals to worms and the landscape. Don’t think you can simply whack them all on full and come out with an omega weapon, however, as there’s a dial in the bottom left which will fall into the red and refuse to let you save the weapon if it’s too overpowered.

Of course, there’s the bit any Worms fans anticipates with glee: being able to create your own battalion of custom named worms, whether they be people you hate and want to see destroyed, your friends, terrible worm related puns, or a combination of everything. This time around it’s even more enjoyable than ever, as you’re able to give them hats, different hands, eye-wear, facial hair, and underwear. Okay, not that last one, but you’re also able to give a team flag, graves, a custom weapon and a themed soundboard, from gangsters and Scotsmen to suave secret agents. There are plenty of options to choose from, and this may be a minor point, but you can only alter the appearance of the team as a whole, and not individual worms. It’s understandable considering how confusing it could get, but it does take away some of the individuality after naming them after various GamingLives writers and then not being able to customise them further with individually selected soundboards, at least.

If you do find yourself wanting more customisation options, however, then you can always make your way to the item store, which’ll slowly accumulate more maps, soundboards and customisation options as you progress through the game. Anyone with any previous Team17 titles on their console will be able to unlock various loyalty items, which sit at the top of the list and can’t be acquired by any other means. If there are any complaints to be made about the item shop, then it’s that it can be slow to scroll through, it doesn’t make clear what items are newly unlocked and you can’t preview costume items before you purchase them, meaning that you may often buy something and find you’ve wasted precious coins. In order to get those coins, you need to progress in the story and challenge modes and beat the Team17 times for an additional bonus.

While many people who hear “Worms” and “Story Mode” in the same sentence may roll their eyes or expect nothing more than an extended tutorial for the multiplayer (and I wouldn’t blame them to think so), I can assure you that this is not the case here or, at the very least, didn’t feel like it. Granted, the first few levels ease you in to a point where you could probably skip the tutorials, but it evolves into a great experience that lets you have fun with Worms without having any friends around. I had a lot of fun with the story mode, and battling worms in various eras in time and indulging in the silly madness of it all was one of my highlights.

One thing that the Story mode showcased to me was just how funny Ultimate Mayhem can really be. Throughout my time with it, I found myself laughing more than I ever expected to, and it’s because, for the most part, the game has such a great sense of personality. From the cut-scenes with Professor Wormwinkle to the opening moments of each level courtesy of the Narrator and your team of worms talking amongst themselves, right up to the out-takes and extra scenes in the credits, you’ll be hard pressed to come out of this game without a smile on your face. Sure, there are plenty of groan inducing puns, but then there are the awesome little touches too: worms holding their hands in front of their faces when you aim at them, pointing to their team-mates as an alternative target or even waving at the camera when you look at them from the blimp view, all of which add to that personality.

With the various challenges available to the player, the Team17 scores to beat, and the story and challenge modes from Worms 3D available, there’s a smorgasbord of single player content here well before you even move your way to the multiplayer. Unfortunately, you won’t feel the same incentive to work your way through the Worms 3D content as much as the Worms 4 content as it’s far more coldly presented and feels more like a series of levels rather than interconnecting chapters.

Sadly, the single player content isn’t without flaw and, while I admit I enjoyed a lot more of it than I thought I would, I was often left frustrated and disappointed. From what I can understand – or rather, imagine – during development, some of Team17 must have tested out new potential drinking games, gotten utterly wasted and coded some platforming sections on a drunken dare. That’s the only way I can justify it to myself, because otherwise it’d mean that they willingly made some of the most terrible platforming I’ve seen in a game this side of the millennium. Okay, some of it isn’t totally irredeemable but, for the most part, platforming sections fall into the distinct fields of “broken” and “when can I go back to having fun?”

Movement within the world is fine, but when you throw platforming into the mix and the game demands at least semi-precision on the matter, you’ll find Worms at its weakest. I’ve lost several turns just trying to navigate the game’s landscape, and I’ve seen others fall prey to it online too. There’s a specific Arabian mission late in the story mode which, if I didn’t know better, I’d swear that it was put in to highlight all the main flaws and faults with the game in a handy five minute chunk of gameplay. Not that it’ll take you five minutes though, as you’ll find yourself restarting the level over and over again when you realise that trying to be somewhat precise with a jet-pack is like performing keyhole surgery with a screwdriver, the grappling hook often gets you stuck on pieces of the environment, and screwing up in any way means you’ll likely have to start from the beginning again. I should mention at this point that if you fail a mission or challenge you’re booted back to the level select menu, and loading takes half a minute whether you’re starting a level anew or restarting halfway through.

On the subject of problems… the shadows look jarring and blocky, the game randomly pauses for a second when worms are about to drown, and there have been more than a few occasions when a worm has become stuck in scenery or started spinning on the spot in first person mode. The camera fixes have helped to a large degree, but there will still often be issues with it, especially when the picture in picture ends up showing just as little as the main camera, defeating the main purpose of it even being there. Acquiring one of the hidden easter eggs is glitched, and the ‘Pimp My Worm’ achievement is glitched as well; while there is a workaround and it is possible to get it, it’s a lot more effort than it should be.

Of course, there’s also the issue of the notorious Worms enemy AI. In the 2D games, the AI was notorious for being either blitheringly brain damaged or robotically accurate, gunning you down with expert precision and scoring seemingly impossible shots against the wind. In the original versions of Worms 3D and Worms 4, the issue instead was the fact that the enemy would often process potential moves for ages and then skip their go. While I can safely say I very rarely experienced either of those problems until the final deathmatch challenges, what I will say is that the AI decisions on the whole tend to be… odd.  In the first game I played, an enemy worm decided to shotgun a worm from across the map with pinpoint accuracy, rather than finish the near-dead worm right in front of him, despite having to aim above that worm’s head to shoot a worm with full health. I’ve come across plenty of moments where the enemy will ignore worms right in front of them or go for illogical attacks which don’t pan out and therefore leave themselves open. As a final note, be prepared to utterly hate cluster bombs by the time you finish a session, as the AI spend so much of their time throwing them at you that I wouldn’t be surprised if they were corporately sponsored by the damn things.

If you don’t fancy playing against the computer, then you’ll feel a lot more at home with the multiplayer, and alongside the standard deathmatch there are plenty of other modes to try out. Survivor Mode involves each team only having one worm at a time until all four of their worms are wiped out, which is an interesting take on the standard formula, but it makes the larger landscapes seem a bit barren and you’ll often find matches ending in a draw when the timer runs out and none of the sides have been wiped out. Homelands seems to just be a deathmatch mode with both sides starting on forts, whereas Statue Defend gives both sides an island with the match only being over when the other side has destroyed all of their pigeon statues. The final mode, which is sadly the most boring, is Destruction mode. As in Statue Defend, both sides are given an island each, but the match isn’t over until enough of the other island has been destroyed. While it sounds fun at first, it soon begins to seriously drag on, especially when both islands are down to their last few bits of health and there’s little else to destroy.

While most multiplayer modes are at least interesting ideas, it won’t be surprising to anyone to hear that the standard deathmatch is still the best choice for your multiplayer mayhem, although if you want to play online, it’s going to be your only choice. At the time of writing I’d made several attempts to play the game online and found any mode that wasn’t deathmatch to be completely barren. I even found that upon exiting a deathmatch and entering another one I ended up against two of the people I’d just lost to. When you set up a match yourself, the game will wait until someone else joins then begins a thirty second countdown until the match starts. People can still join in before the countdown finishes, but if you’re trying to gather several people to face off against you may find yourself disappointed more than once.

The online problems don’t end there, as there are few options to customise each match, with the Wormpot and randomly generated maps unavailable for use online and your view of what’s happening lags several seconds behind what the opposing player is actually doing. When you’re playing with strangers its not too worrying, but it took some of the fun out of playing online with friends, as taunting your mate with their imminent destruction is slightly less exciting when they won’t see what you’ve done for another five seconds anyway. Having said that, it was a lot more fun playing online with a friend and experimenting with what could and couldn’t be done and having victory between us being a mere afterthought in comparison to the wholly more competitive matches when playing against strangers.

My main problem with playing online is just that it feels too slow, especially when your avatars will show up every now and then to react to the proceedings. It’s a cool feature, but it makes the pace feel slower. Granted, if you’re playing four player matches then it’ll always mean that there will be a period of doing nothing in-between turns, but I guess this is another problem of online versus your friends. I can easily imagine putting on the game whenever I have mates round and having those awkward pauses filled without issue (and relish the opportunity to do so in future), however, I can’t really imagine myself mustering the same enthusiasm for the game’s online component down the line -and I doubt there will even be one soon.

When it comes down to it, Worms: Ultimate Mayhem is an especially difficult game to ultimately assess. With two games worth of content wrapped up into a single package, with a bunch of improvements, you’d be a fool to dispute the 1200 MSP it’s being sold for on XBLA. It’s a good title to both pick up and play and tackle extended sessions on, and it’s a title with great personality that you can easily imagine picking up and playing with friends. There’s plenty to customise, loads to do and it proves that Worms can work just as well in three dimensions as it can two. However, there’s the fact that the online experience is lacklustre, with your view lagging behind the real action, fewer options and entire modes deserted. The raft of glitches will, more often than not, force you to restart and cause you to be subjected to the lengthy loading times, and the platforming sections are so hateful that they outright ruin several challenges and levels of the story mode, exposing several of the game’s flaws. More often than not, I enjoyed my time with the game; Worms: Ultimate Mayhem isn’t a bad release, and at times it’s pretty great… it just pains me to say that it’s not an amazing game either.

The first character you’ll be introduced to was one with whom many gamers will be able to relate; Jack is a videogame fanatic, and one who has spent more than enough time digitally preparing for the dead to rise from their graves, so at least someone is enjoying it. As the story unfolds he slowly realises that there’s something all too familiar about this particular apocalypse, so you better hope that someone reinforced the fourth wall, because it’s about to be leaned on.

Jack won’t be the only character you’ll meet, as early on you’ll find his ex-girlfriend Rachel hiding away from the decaying hordes. Seeing as she dumped Jack for spending too much of his time playing videogames, she’s naturally not too keen on the idea of being inside a videogame, and seeks to dissuade Jack from that very conclusion. Fleshing out the rest of the cast are Luxo, an alien who learnt English from watching The Big Lebowski, and Brian, a scientist who probably won’t win any points from Luxo after it transpires that he’s stolen his spaceship. Each character also begins with a stat speciality, with Jack and Rachel having boosts towards attack and speed respectively, meaning that you’ll have to think carefully about how you play, dependent on what character you use. Granted, the story may have a simple “get to safety” narrative running through it, but the game’s cast threaten to make that journey a lot more fun.

One of the biggest draws of Burn Zombie Burn came from the risk taken when choosing whether to set the enemy zombies on fire or not; doing so would make them faster and harder to kill, but risking it would pay off big in the leaderboards. This time around fire won’t be the only thing that will affect your foes, as you’ll now have the ability to shock, irradiate and expose the undead to sound-waves.  Doing so will mutate them accordingly, but relinquishes more experience points for the risk. As the game elements are introduced bit by bit, you’ll start out working your way through the regular hordes and, before long, you’ll find yourself confronting irradiated zombies, sonic zombies and those pesky flaming zombies, too.

While Burn Zombie Burn was an arena-based shooter at heart, All Zombies Must Die! adds a narrative structure to blasting the brain-seeking, which means that you’ll be accepting some quests from sarcastic robotic gates left behind by the military if you want to progress. While some will let you through if you kill all of the surrounding zombies, some will ask for something a little more complex, like picking up craftable items and burgers left behind by those you’re recently converted back to corpses. If you don’t like the task they’ve set you, it is possible to refuse some quests and have them replaced with an alternative one, though it’s not clear what gates will allow you to do so.

When you need a respite from the mindless carnage, you’ll be able to unlock bases for your characters to hide in, the first of which is inside an abandoned police station. Once inside, you’ll be able to level up your character using the experience you’ve gained from completing the gate quests and craft new weapons to help smack down the slack-jawed. There are plenty of combinations to work with as long as you have the items needed, and each character has their own unique weapon that needs to be crafted before use, so it’s worth spending your time seeing what combinations you can come up with. After all, not only do guns that shoot fire-bullets look awesome, but they’ll also give you more experience points to level up with.

The best zombie plans are the ones that involve you and your friends teaming up to wreck havoc, one shotgun blast at a time, and All Zombies Must Die! is a game that understands that. It’s a game that lives for friends (not brains), but don’t expect it to compromise when you show up with your buddies in tow, as it will up-scale the difficulty in accordance to the size of your party; more zombies will appear, they’ll be tougher to kill and quests will take longer before they’re bested. The game also takes on a new level of strategy, as downed players can now be revived, the hordes are tougher and friendly fire’s on (the developers assumed you’ll have a really good reason for shooting your team-mates). Though, you may find yourself tempted to slip a stray bullet or two in your friends’ direction when you discover that the game ranks you all by how many experience points and medals you earned at the end of each chapter.

As Luxo, Rachel and Brian aren’t available at the very beginning of the game, additional players who want to jump into the action will take part as generic soldiers; they don’t have any unique stat attributes, they don’t have their own unique weapon and talking to gates and NPCs will result in being ignored in lieu of the main characters. It’s not ideal, but it’s a great way of accommodating extra players before the other main characters are introduced. Joining the game is as simple as pressing the start button and getting involved, and it’s possible to start the next chapter of the game if certain players aren’t ready, as they can jump back into action as soon as they are. It all works beautifully, and while there’s no doubt it’ll be a fun experience in single player, it’ll really come into its own as soon as there are other people to enjoy the carnage. It makes it all the sadder that the co-operative play is local only, as Doublesix were unfortunately without the budget necessary to bring it to the online scene.

The lack of online play shouldn’t deter you though; All Zombies Must Die! is a frantically fun game that will whet your appetite for mayhem whether you’re with or without friends, and it proves that there’s still some life left for zombie games.

All Zombies Must Die! will shuffle onto the XBLA and PSN in December, with a Steam release soon after.

These Robotic Hearts of Mine

When it comes to narratives and storytelling, videogames are still considered to be in their infancy by many, and for good reason. Many games just insist on treading the same ground over and over again with little variation, and some just don’t even bother. That same disillusion with storytelling was a major reason why I was so drawn to These Robotic Hearts of Mine, an upcoming indie game by Alan Hazelden, as it looks to explore a theme not often delved into videogames: love. The game’s appearance and style is very minimalistic, with the story being told through on-screen text and the puzzles themselves delivered in a style very reminiscent of the 8-bit era.

The mechanics of the game follow that simplicity, with the puzzles simply tasking the player with rotating the onscreen gears until all the hearts are facing upwards. The game takes note of how many turns it takes you to complete each level, and provides you with a handy graph afterwards to show how many turns it took on previous attempts. As a great deal of people had already tried the game out by the time I did, I found that after the early missions, I was finding myself drifting further and further away from the ideal amount of moves, and actually wanted to go back to them to improve my results. Turns out I could, as if you go through a level and find yourself getting stuck or accidentally making a wrong move, there’s the ability to simply undo it or reset the entire puzzle. If you do have to opt for the reset, the game does show you all of your moves in reverse motion, which I found rather handy for seeing where I’d managed to go wrong, which made it easier to correct those mistakes the next time around and made the puzzle solving far more enjoyable than most other titles in the genre.

What do you do if you find yourself getting hopelessly and impossibly stuck? Well, I really probably shouldn’t tell you about this, but… there is an option to skip the puzzles… and I took it. I know, I’m a monster! What made this worse was when Hazelden told me I was the only person he’d seen, at that point, skipping any of the levels. Before I give in my puzzle solving badge and gun, please know that it wasn’t because I found any of the levels too challenging or because I’m bad at games, but because of the story.  Sure, it may be told through text, but I found myself kind of hooked to what story there was, as it was something I certainly can’t recall ever seeing in a game before. After all, videogames aren’t a place where one would commonly find a love story, and as much as I want to talk about it, even though I didn’t get too far before moving on, I don’t want to spoil any of it.  Instead, I want other people to play it and see what happens for themselves, just as I’m looking forward to doing when the game is released, which should be in October or November.

Okay okay, it involves a couple in love and a robot they find one day. But now I’ve told you that you have to check it out when it comes out, deal?

Hard Lines

Dom recently joked in his Tekken Hybrid preview about how often he’d find me at the Saint’s Row the Third stands, punching virtual people in the genitals for a few minutes before moving on to something else, but what he didn’t know was that Saints Row the Third was the only way to distract myself from something even more addicting than performing virtual birth control: Hard Lines.  Released earlier this year on iOS platforms, Hard Lines was created by Spilt Milk Studios’ desire to “create a remake of Snake that wasn’t shit”, and in achieving that objective created one of the most fiendishly addictive score attack games I’ve ever played.

Like Snake, the premise is simple. You’re a yellow line trying to collect as many of the bits on the screen to increase your score and your multiplier, but you won’t be the only one as the longer you stay alive, the more opposing lines will appear to deprive you of your place at the point of the leaderboards, which naturally means you have to destroy them. You can go about this one of two ways: either by causing them to collide with your hard line, or by grabbing one of the rarer red bits, which’ll cause your line to become temporarily invincible and smash through the opposition with ease.

While the game supports multiple modes, the one that the iPads were showcasing most was the Survival mode, which simply expects you to gain the highest score you possibly can by staying alive as long as possible, and if the other modes are anywhere near as addictive then I may have to call the rest of my spare time and tell it I’m washing my hair. While I’ve never especially been one for score attack games, Hard Lines drew me in so much that what should amount to a quick pick up and play game had me standing for ages playing over and over again, utterly transfixed with doing better. When I finally forced myself off the iPads to see what else was on the floor, I did all I could to drag any of my friends to check out the game for themselves, and would always come back later on to find they were still plugging away, trying to best it.

However, this was to be my undoing. After introducing Chris to the game, he soon discovered that at that point I held the highest score on the game’s survival mode, causing us to spend several days desperately trying to outdo each other and be crowned the best damn Hard Lines player at the Eurogamer Expo. As the challenge continued, scores got to levels the developers themselves had never seen before (or so they told us), with my crowning moment being the point where I held the high score on both iPads, my supremacy assured. Or so I thought. Remember that anecdote about at the beginning of this section about me disappearing to play Saints Row the Third? I was DDT’ing my thirteenth grandma of the session when Chris arrived and calmly announced to me that he’d doubled my highest score, besting me at the game I had introduced him to, and making me feel more humiliated and hurt than the old lady whose face I’d just smashed into the pavement.

It’d almost be depressing writing about my defeat, but then I think about Hard Lines and how that game hiding away in the indie tent became one of my titles of the show, and I’m instantly happy again.  Hard Lines is already available on iOS systems, and was recently released onto Android, meaning I can get it back in my life and the creators can have a day’s peace as I’ve finally stopped bugging them to ask if it’s out yet!

Before long, the sound of gunfire echoed and I ran over too late to find a comrade taken down in front of me. Vowing revenge for my fallen squad member, I charged at the enemy, shotgun blazing, only to find myself riddled with bullets and taken out as well, and I was forced to sit back while the rest of my team were taken down one by one by the terrorist scum.  Round two. “Alright,” I thought, “No treating this like what you’re accustomed to, Ed, make sure you work together with your team and think before you charge in. Oh, and no shotgun.”

“Aww! But I like the sound they make!”

“Tough! Now really think about your weapon choice, and stop arguing with your own thoughts, people are looking at you funny.”  I took a closer look at the weapon dial and carefully made my pick between the pistols, machine guns and other weapons on display, all with their own unique stats and advantages, before settling on an assault rifle with a humongous clip, which would leave me more suited to prolonged gunfights before having to reload.

I carefully made my way across the map with another member of my squad to act as backup when the alert was sounded; terrorists have planted the bomb. After a wild sprint, I soon found the bomb in question. With only a few seconds left before the bomb was disarmed, I heard gunfire and panic began to settle in. I clenched my teeth in anticipation, then gave a massive sigh of relief as I disarmed the bomb and won our team the round… only to be brutally gunned down immediately afterwards.  Opting for a similar set-up in the final round, I hoped to repeat my previous glory and help our team defeat those damned dirty terrorists once and for all, but unfortunately was hoisted by my own petard as the gun’s lengthy reload time got the better of me and I was once again made to feast on bullet surprise, my least favourite dish.

Yes, this is Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, the latest in the strategy-based FPS series by Valve. Announced earlier this year, the game was on display at the Eurogamer Expo, allowing everyone to get their hands on the classic demolition mode ahead of the game’s upcoming beta and eventual release next year.  Chris and I were given the chance to interview Chet Faliszek, one of Valve’s lead writers and the man who personally wrote the story for Left 4 Dead and the co-op campaign for Portal 2, and we’d like to extend our thanks to both Valve and Chet for this amazing opportunity.

The game’s in development by yourselves and Hidden Path Entertainment; you co-worked with them on Counter-Strike: Source, and you’re now working with them again. Was it an obvious decision to go back with them?

Yeah, they’re working on some of the bug fixing for Counter-Strike: Source. They’re right around the corner, we’ve known them for a while, and I’m pretty sure they created some models for Left 4 Dead 2. Where we are in Seattle there’s a really big community of developers, like Sucker Punch is literally the next building over, and across the street is Bungie, so we always see everyone around.

You’ve got the game coming out on the Mac, and Valve is making great strides to bring Mac users into the gaming community as a whole, which was unheard of ten years ago. Was that something which, when you sat down to do this, you thought “We have to get Mac on board straight away”, or was it something that came later in the process?

Well for now, we just do it with all of our games, for the Source engine it just works with the Mac, it’s just a matter of just doing it. There’s always some weirdness when we add new features to the engine, and we need to make sure when we do it still works with the Mac, but it’s always part of the process.

You’ve had the Source engine around for quite some time now, how difficult is it to come back and keep adding more to the engine and making sure it can keep up with the games of today?

That’s just the way we work with that engine, we’ve just update it not just replace it, and some point we may say there’s Source 2 or whatever, but really for us there’s been a pretty easy way to keep it and understanding the tools. When you replace an engine you’re replacing the tools and the way that people work, there’s an expense in man hours and people learning and people getting up on it right.

We’ve seen multiple game modes mentioned, can you go into any more detail on those? When we played we had the classic bomb defusal…

Yeah, you have the bomb planting, and there’s two overall modes that encompass everything, and you were playing casual or social mode, and that means friendly fire’s off.  You can buy all the weapons you want because you have unlimited cash at the beginning, and it kind of just lets you get in and play around with stuff, like we do a lot of gaming at Valve, and do a lot of talking about our families when we’re gaming, and it’s that kind of environment. Then we have the competitive side where the friendly fire’s on, you’re being matched based on your ranking or your clan’s ranking, and those are the two overriding different ways to play. Then you were playing the classic demolition, the bomb planting, then we have two maps of hostage rescue, admittedly in office, then we have eight maps of arsenal mode. So there’s Arsenal Demolition, which is really tight, compact bomb planting maps and it’s a team based arsenal mode, then there’s Arms Races, which is the classic gun game and every kill gets you a new weapon and you work your way up to the higher rounds.

You’re well known as a company who put a lot of care into play-testing, and some things that come up in play-testing show up in the final game, so for example with Left 4 Dead 2 there was the sugar mill and the increased amount of witches, which led to canon claiming witches were drawn to sugar, has there been anything major added or omitted as a result for Counter-Strike GO?

Well the biggest play-testing is about to happen with the beta, but when we had the CSS Pros in we had removed armour; now if you play today you didn’t buy armour because money’s not an object in casual mode, so of course you’re going to buy the armour, so why make you buy the armour? But we had to add it back to the competitive side because that’s one of the skills players have – understanding economy and when to not buy it, so they can get more money back versus getting it every time, so that was interesting going through with them, getting their feedback. We’re also talking to the 1.6 Pros and the community at large, and one of the things we learnt with Left 4 Dead 2 really was that the minute we release something, no matter how many people we have in the company testing, within the first hour we get more minutes play-testing than we do internally. With Left 4 Dead 2 Cold Stream, we’re trying to not finish things and put them up for beta, let people play them and experience them, and then based on their feedback we’ll finish them off.

As a company who loves to add even more content to games after the fact (TF2 for example is a completely different game), will it be difficult to add such things to non-PC platforms with Counter-Strike?

In general we kind of have a road-map that we’re working through now with Left 4 Dead 2 and updating for the 360 as well, and we let that lag behind and then we join everything up. It’s a lot easier to be iterative on the PC because we can update, the other stuff we’ll see; we’ve done user-created mutations on both PC and 360. We wish we could update on other platforms as much as we wanted, but that’s not the way things work so we’ll have to keep working with them.

So you mentioned that you have the casual mode, is that to bring in a whole other generation of Counter-Strike players, because I’m 25 and I was playing Counter-Strike when I was about 12/13. It’s been a long time since it initially game out, so is that to make it more user friendly?

Well, it was a PEGI 16 when it came out, so you that means you have bad parents.

I played it at school on the laptops we were given… very secretly…

Really, the way new players will come into it is through any of the modes, and the competitive modes in particular because it’s skill based matchmaking. So right now the problem is if you jump into CSS you’ll come up against someone who’s played the game for seven years who is a pro or who just started playing the game. It’s that kind of uneven play ends up with really weird matches, so we think with the skill based matchmaking, they’ll find themselves playing against people of the same skill, and eventually playing against people with better skill, so that’s how we’ll get people into the game.

You often reward loyal fans with added extras and incentives, such as exclusive hats or free PC copies for investing in the PS3 version and adding cross platform play, if you’re planning on implementing it with Counter-Strike in future is it difficult to find ways to do so without potentially alienating customers on other platforms?

Well we did that with the Steam Play and the 360 users still purchased it. I think it’s fun to have those fights on the forum, but in reality a lot of people play on a lot of different platforms and aren’t so religious about it.

So the game’s scheduled for an early 2012 release?

The Beta will tell us. We’re seeing that now with the Cold Stream DLC from Left 4 Dead 2, people are mad it’s taking so long, but when you get feedback from the community you can’t just make a change and say it’s fixed, you have to change it and let people adapt to playing with that change, and then base your next work off that.

With COD and Battlefield redefining what a FPS is (and they’re so huge now), and other people coming along with great ideas and new perks for their games, why is now the best time for Counter-Strike to make a comeback?

If you look at the PC, a version of Counter-Strike is still the number one played strategic fighter, and there’s a reason for that. It’s about the competition and it’s about the skill. So when you’re playing it’s you against the other person and it’s not based on them getting three more kills previously so they have something they’re going to blow you up with, or they play a thousand more hours than you so they have a different weapon load-out. It’s about during that match, how you play is how you’re going to win or lose. That’s not to knock those other games, those are really fun; I played Modern Warfare 2 which hit a sweet spot with me and I put in an embarrassing number of hours with it, and I’m really looking forward to Battlefield 3. But those are a different kind of game and we think the long lasting appeal of Counter-Strike is its sport-like competition where the rules aren’t changed out from underneath you and that work you put in to get better at it pays off.