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LA Cops is a fast, action packed 3D top down shooter set to a theme of 70s Cops in LA trying to do a tough job in a tough town. Sounds great right? This should be good. Team 17’s latest shooter is pretty much a more colourful clone of Hotline Miami. The aim of the game is to complete missions, these can range from saving hostages to destroying drug tables. With funny cut scenes and a 70’s track on repeat, this game seemed like it was going to be a lot of fun. La Cops lets you select two playable characters which you can flick between whilst you’re playing in-game, this gives the game a more unique feel. There’s a good selection of cops to choose from, all with typical 70’s textbook cop names like Kowalski. If you go down, you automatically switch to play as your partner which you need to use to pick up health packs and doughnuts in order to revive your other player. Although having two cops to play with sounds like a good idea, it really isn’t, we found ourselves stick with one guy and running through each level just playing as the one, we found this more fun than trying to move through the level as a team of two. The more you play with each cop, the more they level up, leveling them up with give them many more benefits including more health, increased speed, more ammo and allow their weapons to deal more damage. There is a melee attack which allows you to arrest the criminals, you need to creep up behind them and chuck a pair of handcuffs on them. The levels are short and sweet. Each level is a different setting with different missions, this stop the game feeling repetitive. Each level is graded at the end, the final grade is based on many factors, how many criminals you arrested, how many kills you got, e.t.c. The graphics are very basics, the characters don’t even have mouths, this makes cut scenes very funny and enjoyable. For the first couple of settings, you’re aided with auto aim, this makes everything so much easier, being able to shoot drug lords and criminals behind closed doors before they come launching at you. When you play on the harder settings, the auto aim gets taken away and you have to try and use the left thumb stick to aim. We found this quite difficult. The movement in the game is smooth which makes it more enjoyable. The game is short and there’s only 13 achievements which are pretty easy to get, the hardest being complete the game on each setting. Even though there are some faults with this game, some things that could be brushed up on, we found ourselves playing this game for ages, we really enjoyed it and liked it. We would recommend it to anyone.

Sega’s Creative Assembly has added another great addition to its Total War strategy game series. Total War: Attila takes you back to the Dark ages, way back to 395AD. Total War: Attila is what Rome II should have been, with its dynamic gameplay, this add on is so much more compelling. Total War: Attila focuses on the fall of the empire, the player chooses from a selection of tribes, each tribe representing different campaigns, which means each tribe offers their own challenges and advantages for the player. With the chosen tribe,the player must try survive and profit from the collapse of order. Trouble comes in many forms, bad weather, court intrigues, diplomatic crises with others and plagues, all of which makes surviving a struggle. The life like battles are thrilling. With this new add on comes some cool new abilities. It’s now possible for horde tribes to survive out on the road without having to have a static base. The life like battles are thrilling, there are quite a few menus and screens, which take a while to get used to. Even though Creative Assembly have worked on their menus to shorten and simplify them, they are still quite complicated and can be frustrating at times. There are some technical difficulties and we had trouble getting the game to run smoothly as its such a large game but as soon as we got past this, it was a great, fun game and definitely the addition to this brilliant series that we’ve been waiting for. It can be very difficult and frustrating at times but overall we did enjoy playing Total War: Attila.

Pillar, a psychological puzzler, was this week released for the PlayStaiton 4. Michael Hicks, the creator of the game, described the game as “a collection of minigames, where each game represents a different type of personality that we find in people. For example, there are introverts that lose energy from being around people, extroverts that expand energy from interacting with others, characters that make decisions with logic, characters that make decisions with feeling and so on. My goal is to express these traits entirely through gameplay mechanics.”And that’s exactly what the game is. When you first start up the game you’re greeted with a screen of a selection of personality qualities, such as Distant, focused and enduring,which you have to choose from, we found this quite different from other games we had played. When you click onto the different personalities you are given a different character. After choosing your character, you are thrown into the game. With no tutorials or written dialogues, its hard to find out exactly what you’re supposed to be doing or even where you’re supposed to go. A couple of hours and a few Youtube videos later, we kinda realised what we were meant to be doing, sort of. After figuring out what we were meant to be doing, one of the other characters in the game decided to chase us which made the screen go all distorted and we got put into a mini game. This game is one where you really need to think outside of the box and think of how your actions will effect something else. The visuals in this game are beautiful, a hand painted snowy town really set this game apart from the rest. The colours used in the game set an atmosphere which is helped greatly by the music, we found it quite relaxing. Considering this game was made by just a team of two people, this game is pretty impressive. Personally, this isn’t our type of game, however, we definitely think this game will appeal to a large audience and it has a lot going for it. There is a lot of interest for this game as its something we don’t see very often, the psychological aspect is one that a lot of people find interesting.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]