Games

Over its 15-year history, EA’s Need for Speed series has tried, with varying success, to use stories to jazz up its racing and create a richer experience. Need for Speed: The Run promised to be one of the more interesting attempts, being built on the stunning Frostbite 2 engine (as used by Battlefield 3) and using a fairly appealing premise — to save your character, Jack Rourke, from being whacked by the mob, you’ve got to win an epic illegal street race that spans the American continent from San Francisco to New York.

Assassin’s Creed: Revelations is a disappointment by the increasingly assured standards of the series. But the reasons are pretty interesting. There are definitely mechanical issues here: returning to the storyline of 15th century Italian assassin Ezio Auditore for a third (presumably final) time, Revelations outfits an aging Ezio with several new tools, the most prominent being a large variety of grenades and ability to order subordinate assassins around in a tower defence-style minigame. 

In Orcs Must Die! you’re a War Mage trying to defend rifts (gateways to our world) from endless waves of orcs and their fiendish associates. The gameplay is fast, fluid and very addictive. The satisfaction derived from watching your cunningly planned sequence of traps squish, spike and flambé hundreds of unsuspecting orcs can’t be overstated. To get the job done, your character can utilise a variety of traps (spikes, blades, swinging maces, fire, harpoons and so on), guardians (Archers and Paladins) and spells. 

EA spends a lot of money on its premiere sports titles and this one is no exception: FIFA 12 is a great-looking game, but then it has been for some time. This year’s iteration has largely defensive tweaks, as the controls for tackling players relentlessly give way to a containment system that more closely mirrors what happens in real life — as such, timing is quite important, but at the same time it’s harder to simply rush in against inexperienced opponents.

Superhero games have such a feeble history that it’s not at all controversial to suggest that 2009's Batman: Arkham Asylum the finest superhero game ever made. Mixing the best of the comic, film and animated incarnations of Batman, it presented a well-plotted and designed action explorer. With its sequel Arkham City, developer Rocksteady Studios has essentially made more of the same, only in a much bigger open-world arena.

Saints Row: The Third isn’t for everyone. After all, this anarchic Grand Theft Auto-alike has been heavily marketed as prurient, violent and immature and if you’re buying in, there’s an assumption that you’re down with that. The question here is more of taste. It can’t match the polish or borrowed gravitas of its closest competitor’s composite personality of film references.

If the last few years of game releases have made one thing abundantly clear, it’s that craftsmanship and polish count for a lot. Bethesda Softworks is undeniably a master of the former — the company’s made a name building huge, open and gripping role-playing games (RPGs), but that scale often comes at the cost of polish — almost all of its titles have a lovable roughness to them. Skyrim is different. In terms of size, polish and creativity, it’s one of the most ambitious games ever made and it’s almost certainly the biggest RPG ever.

There’s a lot to be told from the influences that Battlefield 3 wears on its sleeve. As a single-player game, this military shooter is clearly indebted to its competition. If you haven’t had your fill of Modern Warfare’s (MW’s) perspective switching, globetrotting stories about terrorists (yawn) stealing nuclear weapons (stretch) and the hard-arse marines that stop them (zzz), here’s another scalding helping. Online, however, it's another story — Battlefield 3 leaves its competition in its wake.

Honestly, we wish we could score Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (MW3) lower, but it’s just too competent. Everything about this sequel is cynical and (arguably) mean-spirited. But invariably, just as exasperation sets in at yet another transparent attempt to court controversy or sell players the same experience year in and year out, it’ll drop a genuinely spectacular set piece and impress with its frightening self-confidence.

With only two customisable weapons, a very mid-1990s interface and level design, and the usual uni-designed game crutch of using robot enemies to hide an art team’s shortcomings, our expectations of Hard Reset weren’t high. But after a couple of hours with this barebones first-person shooter (FPS), we questioned our initial judgement.