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Most shooters start the player off with some kind of assault rifle, maybe a sub-machine gun if the designers are feeling stingy, plus a dinky little side-arm that never actually sees any use. Not so Red Faction: Guerrilla. In this game, right after the introductory cutscene, you’re given a humongous sledgehammer and a satchel of [...]

For a game that now claims membership of the Civilization family, Colonization lacks the breadth, depth, variety and sheer richness of its more famous cousins and is the poorer game for it. For one thing, it covers only a narrow slice of history, from 1492 to 1792 to be exact and despite its generic name, [...]

There’s no denying that Kerberos Productions has their priorities right: in a space-based 4X game, the big draw are the ships and Sword of the Stars, with all of its expansions added in, delivers that in spades. Want to build a missile boat with launch tubes dotting its entire surface? You can do that. How [...]

Once upon a time, the Grand Theft Auto series was held up as the gold standard of open world games. True, the series never actually invented the genre, and if you want to be pedantic about it, early games like Elite were way more open and far larger in scope than any of the GTA [...]

While I’m been away from my PC over the past week, I’ve been indulging my gaming habit with this gem of a game on my PSP. It’s essentially a shrunk down version of Midnight Club: Los Angeles for the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 but it still packs an astonishing amount of content and [...]

One of the most important lessons any aspiring designer can learn is to heed Sid Meier’s dictum that a good game is a series of interesting decisions. This is precisely what the dark fantasy-themed Fall from Heaven 2 is all about. There is no point in the game where a particular path of action becomes [...]

In a way, Empire is what Creative Assembly’s Total War series has always been building towards. Epic doesn’t even begin to describe its scope. Three distinct theatres, a dizzying multitude of major and minor factions, a greatly expanded strategic layer involving tech trees and multiple towns in each region, the ability to play naval battles [...]