How do you follow an act like the galaxy’s most high-stakes game of three-card monte? Apparently by completely starting over. BioWare has long insisted that Mass Effect 3 marked the definitive end of Commander Shepard’s story arc, regardless of whether you picked the green pill, the red pill, or the blue pill. The good news,…
State of Decay: Breakdown raises an important question: does downloadable content still count as content when it takes out more content than it adds? After all, this is still Trumbull Valley as we left it back in June, but here there are no squabbles with military hard-asses or heroic attempts to overcome blocked mountain passages.…
Mike Donatelli, design director for Carbine’s upcoming MMORPG WildStar, isn’t exactly your friendly neighborhood developer. The games community could probably use a bit more folks like him. Back during PAX Prime, he tells me, a casual raider complained about how WildStar seemed designed to keep him from getting top-tier gear without joining a 40-man raiding…
They say you never forget how to ride a bike, but you couldn’t tell it from my first few minutes with the iOS port of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Rival gang members were on my tail, my friends were speeding down highways and alleys on bikes of their own, and even the cops were…
Atwald the minstrel, jerk that he is, showed his face about three hours into my playthrough of Helm’s Deep. Not for him the mundane tasks of picking eight flowers for medicine or slicing hides off of six deer—oh, no. “Is this really and truly how you chose to spend your time?” he asks, mocking my…
Huntsman: The Orphanage prompts many questions. Who is the huntsman? How did 12 orphans vanish without a trace from a rural Illinois orphanage in 1897? For that matter, where can I pick up that sweet smartphone that talks to the dead and never loses a charge? Huntsman doesn’t answer all of these questions, but some…
Farming Simulator 2013 claims it’s about farming, but in practice it’s more concerned with the business of cultivation — and it’s a child’s vision of agricultural life at that. Its greatest strengths lie in its depiction of the process of groovin’ up rows of dirt while planting seeds, and a welcome assortment of speed sliders…
Romancing socially awkward elves might be on the outs in this free-to-play spinoff, but Heroes of Dragon Age for iOS nevertheless manages to capture the spirit of BioWare’s beloved dark fantasy series from consoles and PC. However, the familiar music and faces merely amount to a pretty show. Strip away the ambiance, the lore, and…
Leif Johnson 