DarkFire

What would happen if you mixed the best parts of Hexen, Heretic and Quake, dressed them up with the very latest Unreal engine 4 tech to make the game look incredibly beautiful but yet 90's retro? Add in some incredibly innovative weapons, superb level design, really atmospheric music and sound and then to top it all off add in some of the tightest, best done FPS combat in any game I've ever played? Amid Evil is that game. If you love the thought of 90's retro FPS gaming this is an absolute must buy. It's easily worth twice the price

This may well be the best Tropico game to date. Looks like the dev team took the best features of T4 and T5, mixed them together and added a pile of new stuff for us to do. We're back to the individual simulation of citizens with politics & economics also being simulated. Multiple islands provide a welcome dose of 'realism' along with the opportunity for huge sprawling cities, and of course a suitably massive palace for El Presidente. Great game so far. There are a couple of bugs but nothing game breaking and the dev team appear to be hard at work. The game is also very well optimised and looks really nice. All in all this is a winner.

The graphics are reasonable, the sound is OK, but that's as far as this game goes. All the wonderful aspects of DoW1 and DoW2 that made them enjoyable, albeit very different games, have been removed. As a hard core DoW and 40K fan, this game simply doesn't cut it. In the Emperor's name, this heresy **** must not survive!

For players new to Blood Bowl, this game is as much fun as sticking your unmentionables in a vice and turning slowly whilst giggling madly. PVP matches are based solely on team value rather than player skill, so having a basic team get pounded time after time by levelled teams means that getting any of the players levelled up without injury after injury or even death, becomes a pointless grind. Losing match after match simply isn't fun, and what on earth is the point of playing a game if not to have fun? Plus points? The character animations are excellent and Jim and Bob the commentators are hillarious! A great addition to this sort of game. Would I recommend this? If you're familiar with Blood Bowl (either the board game or the first Blood Bowl PC game) then yes, having pre-existing knowledge of how each type of player works and how each type of team plays will be essential and will allow you crucial early victories, enabling your players to develop their skills. If you've never played Blood Bowl before or are unfamiliar with this type of game then I can only suggest getting a hammer and breaking your own fingers with it, you'll have much more enjoyment than you would playing this game.

I'll give this game a solid 7/10. The first few missions in which the player is mostly directed by an AI target spotter companion mostly work, though the mechanic produces tense moments along side frustration on the odd occasion when the stupid spotter gets you detected by the enemy. That being said, the spotter mechanic provides an easy introduction in to the best method of approaching the various situations the game presents. Though it uses the Crye engine the graphics aren't exactly the best that the engine can produce, a fault that I would imagine is caused by the fact that in addition to being developed for the PC the dev team had to accommodate the vastly lower technical abilities of previous-generation consoles. This also produces my main complaint about the main game - it's incredibly linear, almost to the point of being an on-rails shooter. The Siberian Strike DLC freed things up considerably and while it's no FarCry 3, the DLC gives the player a much more diverse number of approaches to any given situation and far less hand-holding than the vanilla game and is a much more enjoyable experience for it. Overall Ghost Warrior is one of the better portrayals of a military special ops sniper role for the PC and for that reason alone is an interesting game to play. Finally, I can't really comment on the multi-player aspects of the game as the few servers that I could get the game to connect to were empty. By now the game is entirely forgotten on line.

The concept behind the game is, taken on it's own, rather good. I loved the idea of having an entire city in which to run around and try to survive. Unfortunately this game has become a showcase of poor design decisions and a dev team that apparently refuses to respond to community concerns and wishes. I tried to love the mixture of PVE and PVP game play but ultimately it just isn't fun. Sadly the idea that you can spend hours and hours gathering gear, surviving the mutant hordes only to be randomly picked off by a sniper that you never even saw, only to have to start again afresh, seems to attract the most blaqtant griefers from all corners of the net. Spawn camping, tea-bagging and general griefing are all strong in Nether. If the dev team had opted for either a PVE or PVP mode, i.e. a SP game OR an MP game, I could see this being a success, despite the legions of bugs that infest the current build. Unfortunately there really isn't any long-term goal to the gameplay other than spawn-collect gear-die-start again. That captured my interest for about a week. I really can't recommend this game to anyone. If you like PVP games then ther's COD, Battlefield, Unreal Tournament etc. etc. If you enjoy PVE with a survival bent then I'd heavily recommend the STALKER games. Nether is a bizarre attempt to mix both game types and is one which sadly fails at the conceptual level, never mind the currently bug filled execution. Avoid.

Had it not been for the original Supreme Commander this game would no doubt have been seen as fairly good. Unfortunately, despite the reasonable selection of units and structures, the immense scale of the original game is gone, leaving small maps over which victories are easily achieved in minutes. Gone are the experimental units that would take entire armies to destroy. Instead experimental units, while powerful, are nothing like the game changers that they were in the original Supreme Commander. SC2 is a perfect example of what happens to a game that's dumbed down, scaled down and severely compromised in order to enable it to run on 5 year old console hardware. If you've played the original Supreme Commander or Forged Alliance then move along, there really isn't anything to see here. If you're new to the Supreme Commander franchise then buy the gold edition of the original game that comes with the excellent Forged Alliance add-on pack. Again, SC2 does nothing at all that wasn't done much better in the original game.

Having been an avid online gamer since the early days of Quake, Unreal Tournament & Starsiege Tribes, I was quite looking forwards to having a go at Nuclear Dawn. Things didn't start well when it took me around 10-12 attempts to actually connect to even a previously empty game to see what things were about. Having played for a few hours I have to say that I'm seriously struggling to be impressed by Nuclear Dawn. The graphics, while functional, appear to be circa 2007 and are nothing special at all. The sound is admittedly reasonably good, though I eventually found the music to be annoying. The controls are acceptable and follow the standard setup for games based on the source engine. My main issue with Nuclear Dawn is the game play mechanic. The game play is a mixture of RTS and FPS. This is a fairly rare hybrid and there's a good reason why that is the case - the success of your team is extremely heavily dependant on the skill of the "commander" player. A poor commander results in frustrating annihilation for your team. I could accept the decidedly mediocre graphics if the game play was hugely engaging. Unfortunately it isn't. I was expecting something akin to the original tribes, however there's just too much missing to make Nuclear Dawn a compelling experience. You're unable to adjust your loadout until you die. You can't re-arm. In a couple of games I ran out of ammunition for my primary weapon, forcing me to carry out a pointless suicide charge at the enemy base. There exists a fair number of available upgrades, however their availability is dependant on research that comes from buildings created by the Commander (RTS) player. Again, a poor commander results in pointless and frustrating death after death due to being faced by foes equipped with vastly superior weapons & equipment. If I wanted to play a mindless twitch FPS then I'd load up Unreal Tournament 3 with it's glorious Unreal powered graphics and sound. If I want to play something somewhat more sophisticated then ARMA 2 fits the bill quite nicely. There's a reason why the original Tribes was so popular for years after it was released, despite it's game engine becoming utterly obsolete - the game play offered such a variety of tactics and strategies that it was hugely engaging. Unfortunately Nuclear Dawn offers no such variety and quickly devolves to a repetitive and frankly uninspiring point-capture game. I have to say that for the most part the level design is also uninspiring. Yes, there are a fair few levels and each offers a very different environment, but again that which is available is sadly limited by what is by now an old game engine. I was expecting more of a brand new game. Much more. I hope that Nuclear Dawn is a success for the developers because it's quite an achievement for an indie outfit. Unfortunately in a very crowded genre there just isn't enough on offer at the moment to make it worthy of a serious investment of play time. I may give this another look in 6 months, but for now it just didn't capture my interest well enough given the simplistic game play and mediocre graphics.