Game Informer has revealed in its January cover story – the oft-rumored Tomb Raider reboot. The new game, called simply Tomb Raider, features a younger Lara Croft shipwrecked on a mysterious island and forced to survive on her own.
Dragon Age was a popular and critically acclaimed title followed in the footsteps of earlier Bioware games like Baldur’s Gate, a Dungeons and Dragons-based RPG that has since been considered one of the most classic games of its generation. As the year comes to a close, it is good news to know that the sequel, Dragon Age II, is set for release shortly into the new year (March) with a new storyline, new characters and a fully voiced main character.
Those of you still play Final Fantasy XI on the 360 have reason to rejoice because Square Enix is releasing a patch that increases the level cap a whole 5 levels, from 85 to 90. In addition to that, Wings of the Goddess areas are going to be updated to factor in the increase in player level cap.
It’s just one day before the new World of Warcraft expansion, Cataclysm goes on sale. Are you reading this on your phone while huddling in a tent in front of Best Buy, or are you snuggled up at home, defragging your rig, secure that the UPS Overnight guy will bring you that copy of Cataclysm you ordered from Amazon? Regardless, Amazon sympathizes with your obsessive desire to buy the last great game of 2011, so they’re holding a sale on every BUT the new game you want.
Not even a buck; ninety-nine cents, in fact. Sure, it was a fifteen-dollar downloadable budget title to begin with, and it isn’t that great, but it’s certainly going to bring you a few hours of entertainment, and the 99¢ chicken sandwich you’d get at a fast food restaurant will only give you about five minutes of snacking pleasure.
Dead Nation was one hell of a roller coaster ride from start to finish. Gorgeous graphics and disgustingly detailed audio contribute heavily to the hopeless atmosphere of the game, and the constant swarms of enemies will leave you gasping for breath after each encounter. Despite the game’s excellent production values and taught pacing, I could not shake a certain feeling the entire time I played the game. At first, I could not quite put a finger on it. But as waves of zombies and special infected bombarded my co-op partner and I, and we were really pushed back against the wall, I realized why I realized that this feeling was deja-vu. To put it bluntly, Dead Nation is Left 4 Dead, only from a top down perspective.
Being a PS3-exclusive game, it is entirely possible that you will pick up Dead Nation having never experienced any of the 360 and PC exclusive Left 4 Dead games. If this is the case, and a top down zombie survival game sounds appealing to you, Dead Nation is a safe purchase. The game mechanics are largely high quality and your fifteen dollars will get you a surprisingly long and intense campaign. But anyone who has played one of Valve’s seminal zombie games will notice exactly how derivative Dead Nation really is. Perhaps this should not be a huge surprise, given that Housemarque’s last game, Super Stardust HD, was essentially Geometry Wars on a sphere. However, in the case of Super Stardust, Housemarque added power-ups and new modes of play that were not present in the competition at the time, elevating the game to classic status. In this case, innovations are few and far between. Sure, you can purchase new upgrades for your weapons in the safe rooms, but that is about the only thing aside from the perspective separating Dead Nation from Left 4 Dead. As much as I enjoyed this game, the similarities often proved too much to overlook.
In the industry today, there’s one genre that has been dominant for the past 5 years, and that is the First Person Shooter. This isn’t surprising, but due to this, many of the genres that populated the PS2 and Xbox era are now obsolete, and we rarely see a game in these genres. One of these genres is the ATV racer. During the days of the PS2, series such as ATV Offroad Fury were popular, and therefore, got support from publishers and developers. We’ve gotten attempts at replicating the successful ATV racer formula in games such as MX vs. ATV Reflex, but they’ve never captured what makes these games so much fun; the sense of barely controlling your vehicle at high speeds in fun tracks. Nail’d, a game by the creators of Call of Juarez, is another such attempt at recreating the ATV racer. While it succeeds in the gameplay of this genre, it lacks in content, making it a game for hardcore ATV racer enthusiasts only.
