Kevnvek

Orcs Must Die! is about the last of the War Mages defending the fortresses of the Order, an organization dedicated to stopping the orcs from invading their world. In each fortress there is a rift leading back to your home world, which you must stop the orcs from entering. You are given many traps to place as you progress through the game, as well as archers and paladins that will attack nearby enemies. You also have weapons ranging from your trusty crossbow and blade staff, to items that allow you to cast offensive magics. Using all of these, you must kill all of the invaders as they rush into the fortress. In the beginning of a level you have time to set up your defenses before pressing a button to commence the battle, and you get other such breaks after every few waves. Otherwise, you normally only get about fifteen seconds between each attack. Attacking enemies vary from standard melee orcs, ranged crossbow-weilding orcs, weak kobolds that rush towards the rift, slow but powerful ogres, flying enemies, and others. You primarily gain money for traps and henchmen by killing enemies, and often will have to place traps during combat to strengthen your defenses. You can also purchase combat upgrades and other perks. You must choose between three different spell weavers to purchase these perks. Each grants you a different tree of abilities to use, focusing on player spells, traps and henchmen, and other bonuses. You can construct barriers to direct the orcs' movement. Make sure that the orcs still have a route to the rift, though, or they'll break through the first barrier they get to. When you're satisfied with your defenses, you can rush to meet the enemy head on with your crossbow, blade staff, or spells. Personally I found the sword to be underpowered, as you take much more damage while using it, whereas the crossbow can be used to great effect to pick off enemies with head shots from a distance.. The spells you can use include a pushing wind spell, a fire spell, an ice spell to freeze opponents in place, and a lightning spell. All weapons and spells have an alternate attack as well, with effects such as stunning. The clockwork mace was by far my favorite trap. Combined with slowing oil, wall arrows, spikes, some paladins to take care of stragglers, and the air spell to push enemies back into said swinging death balls if they make it through, you have a fiendishly lethal barricade to stop your enemies in their tracks. Though the controls for the Xbox 360 controller are fairly good, I found the controls with a keyboard and mouse to be a bit more accessible and precise. This isn't really a fault of the game, just the nature of console controllers in general. There aren't many controls to memorize, but numerical mapping for traps and weapons is much faster than scrolling through weapons and abilities with a button. Graphically there isn't much to say for the game, except maybe that it succeeds in having a decent, mildy cartoonish, stylistic look within the limitations of an arcade style game. Nothing looks particularly bad, but it's not as if you can zoom in and see lots of fine detail. The music also has a somewhat whimsical style, presenting you with an almost taunting sounding track as you complete a level. Completing levels nets you a certain amount of skulls depending on your performance, with five being the maximum. These are used to upgrade your traps and make them more effective. You can go back to previous levels with newly unlocked and upgraded equipment to improve your score to get more skulls. This gives the game fairly good replayability, and makes it rather addictive. It also has a fair length with twenty-four fortresses to defend. Be sure to spend your upgrade points wisely on the traps you really use, because upgrades are irreversible. After completing the campaign you unlock Nightmare difficulty. In this mode you can replay the same levels but earn an entirely new set of skulls for each level you complete. What makes Nightmare mode so much harder is that you don't get more than three seconds between waves at any time to setup traps. Often you must set your traps during combat. It is much more hectic without the occasional pause to place your defenses. Orcs Must Die! provides an interesting twist on tower defense style gameplay, and is yet another good example of genre mixing done well. It never feels too strategy heavy or entirely too much like a basic hack and slash game. It succeeds in having its own style and very solid gameplay. If you are looking for a fun but strategic game, Orcs Must Die! is a fine choice. It is currently out on the Xbox LIVE Arcade, and releases for the PC on October 12th.

All the usual gameplay elements are still here and essentially the same. This time around, after escaping from a septic tank out in the countryside and getting back to civilization, you find yourself in a local festival known as Clapfest. You make your way through the festival, talking to people and picking up odd knick-knacks with which to solve the various problems you run into. It was kind of nice to have the game take place in one mostly contiguous area, as opposed to using a map to travel to various locations around the city. The map is still there for convenience, but you can mostly walk from one end of the playable area to the other without using it. The humor seems to be improved a bit compared to the second game, which at times felt a little hit and miss. I never knew that shooting a giant vibrator out of a colossal pair of stretchy underpants could be so satisfying. The story feels a bit more meaningful as well. Whereas you spent most of the second episode trying to find the identity of the terrorist (even though it was kind of obvious from the very first episode), in this installment you must thwart his evil plans to destroy Clapper's Wreake and stop him once and for all. Just when you think you've gotten to the final confrontation and ending cutscene, the game has a bit more to offer as you finish up the case. It's length was on par with the second game. Still short, but not too bad of a length. Hector: Badge of Carnage - Episode 3: Beyond Reasonable Doom (hey, I gotta say the whole name at least once in the review) provides a fairly satisfying conclusion to the Hector trilogy. It's been a long, dark, and filthy journey, but in the end it was worth a few good laughs. The series overall was enjoyable, and this final episode is definitely worth checking out if you're a fan of the series.

There are plenty of zombie games, and even more RPGs, but surprisingly few hybrids of the two, not counting RPGs that happen to include zombies somewhere in them. Dead Island essentially plays like Borderlands, as many have aptly pointed out. The game mostly focuses on melee weapons. There are two categories of melee weapons: sharp and blunt, which are good at severing and breaking limbs respectively. The weapons wear down and have to be repaired, but it is possible to upgrade and mod your weapons. Later on you can stick batteries on your weapons with mods to make them cause electric damage, or coat them in poison. You can also throw your weapons at the infected to deal some damage without wearing your weapon down, but I found the idea unappealing later on in the game when all my weapons were very valuable and you can die so easily, regardless of the fact that your thrown weapons should stay where they landed and can't be picked up by co-op partners. All the usual RPG elements are there. Leveling up and putting points into your skill trees to get more powerful, collecting and selling loot, and so on. Even most of the zombie game tropes are intact, such as the presence of different types of infected, ranging from massive, charging, straight-jacket wearing zombies, to the usual protuberant growth-covered exploding zombies. One thing that was missing that I wish the game did have was armor, or at least some skills to increase your damage resistance. I understand that it's supposed to be a survival game, being about zombies, but dying in two or three hits even at high levels can be very annoying. Fortunately the only penalty for dying is a loss of ten percent of your money. It is also possible to revive co-op partners with med kits to prevent this loss. Sadly, in terms of story, Dead Island fails as an RPG. The lyric from a song in the game, "Who do you voodoo, bitch?" pretty much sums up the vast emotional depth of the game. Characters are forgettable. Every survivor you meet is a whiny, helpless person who wants you to do something meaningless like retrieve their precious teddy bear (yes, there is actually a quest to get someone's teddy bear, and it's a grown damn woman...) Not all of the sidequests are that ridiculous, but they can be very tedious when you have to walk back and forth through the same areas of the game over and over. You never really feel connected to the story with it's lack of proper depth and presentation. Even the promise of somewhat interesting main characters that you get from the intro and bios during character selection, goes unfulfilled. During the few cutscenes where the playable characters actually have something to say none of their supposed personality shows through. Instead you get gems like "If we don't stick together, we f***ed." Fortunately, the story, presentation, and inane sidequests are my only major gripe about the game. The game had some major launch issues, such as the wrong version coming out and there being many bugs, but the game has been patched extensively as of this writing, and more patches are certainly on their way. I played the PC version, but I gave the game a whole week before starting to play it properly. This gave it plenty of time to get patched up, and time for me to organize co-op with a friend, making the game much more enjoyable than solo. Graphically, the game looks pretty good. There are some slight issues such as a very noticeable change from high to low resolution textures at a short distance away that cannot be increased with any PC options, and the face models of any NPC aside from the main characters are utterly atrocious with the way the lighting system casts lines on their faces that make everyone appear over fifty regardless of their age, but the environments often look very beautiful. The nice thing is, the game has a surprisingly varied amount of locales. After every few main quest mission you go to a new area, from the beach, to the city, and even deeper into the island in the jungles. After a while you may not even recognize the game from where you started out on the beach, it feels entirely different as you advance to new areas. Useless story and some technical issues aside, Dead Island can be a very fun game. I personally didn't have any major issues with how the game worked or a need to use them, but others will attest that the many user mods and tweaks have improved their experience greatly. If you have some friends looking to have a good time in co-op, Dead Island is the perfect game to mess around in. Just don't expect any kind of amazing plot development. With some work on the story though, I think the concept of a zombie RPG has great potential, and Dead Island sets a good example for what kind of cool things can come from crossing genres.

All of the crude humor is intact, from church-themed strip clubs, to French restaurants with questionable hygienic practices, putting unidentified objects on your face to emulate having a beard, and many other uncomfortable scenarios. If you enjoyed the first episode, you will most likely enjoy this one. However I couldn't help but feel that the first game was funnier. Episode 2 still has its moments, but it almost felt like it was trying too hard. One important thing to note is that the length of the episode is about twice that of the first. This is good, as it means that the you're not as likely to complete the game in one or two sittings, effectively increasing the value of the game. There are enough locations to explore and people to talk to that the game has a fair length to it this time around. I seldom play many point and click games, but I managed to get through the first game without using the hint button. This time around, some of the ways to advance the investigation seemed a bit more obscure. This is good for fans of the genre who like a good puzzle. I myself had to look at the hint page a few times. It was fun to read since I missed it the first time around. You are greeted by a condescending text that will answer your general questions, or give you a step by step walkthrough if you choose the option. The menu is reached by talking to Lambert to get clues on the case and choosing the option, "I need a proper hint". You can teleport to Lambert by pressing the Hint button in the bottom right corner. In the end, I'd say that Hector Episode 2 was a fairly fun second episode to what looks to be an amusing trilogy. Fans of crude humor and point and click games will likely enjoy it, and at the new season price of $20 for all three episodes, it seems to be a worthy purchase. As of this writing, the pack is on sale on Steam for only $15. The third and final episode will be released sometime this Fall.

Let me put it this way: I've been playing the original on and off for almost a year and had about 9 hours of in game time in it (time spent actually in a song, so it's more than it sounds like). In just two days I added another 4 hours to that time. Those evil geniuses over at Cold Beam Games knew just what needed to be added to bring an already addictive game to a whole new level of addictiveness. Whereas in the original you would max out after a certain point, and everything after that was just another number added to your rank every 10 million points, Ultra adds more addictive elements like a currency system (via pickups) and perks. Also added were new enemy types, a new mode, and multiplayer. The perk system adds things like new weapons, increased chances for multiplier drops, abilities that enhance the new weapons, and several other enhancements to help you survive and get higher scores. Every time you rank up you get to choose a new perk, then must buy it, as well as any upgrades you want for it, in the main menu. The new weapons you can get can really change up the gameplay. The missiles were my least favorite of the three new weapons, but they had their usefulness. You fire out a barrage of missiles that individually target the biggest threats to you and try to destroy them. The ultra beam essentially emulates the effect of the most intense sections of a song, making your beam intensely powerful for a brief moment. It's perfect for taking out those turrets on a boss that happens to be harassing you, as well as quickly blasting a pair of particularly annoying new enemies that can draw you in or push you away, limiting your movement. My personal favorite new "weapon" however is the shield. For a short while you gain a barrier around you that renders you completely invincible. While in this state, not only do reflected projectiles go back and target enemies, but you can use the shield as a battering ram, clearing out lines of weaker enemies and clusters of asteroids. The difficulty has also been slightly rebalanced in Ultra. A very nice new feature I noticed was that the slow parts of the songs where your firepower is drastically reduced are made significantly less painful by the fact that everything around you, enemies, projectiles, etc., slows down to match your weakened firepower. The new mode added is called Boss Rush. In it you face waves of bosses that come one after another over time. The spawns are time based, so the next boss will come regardless of whether you're still sparring with the last. The time between spawns becomes increasingly shorter, until later on you can have several on screen at once. It can get pretty hectic, but it's a nice change of pace from the standard mode, as most of the time you don't have to worry about that one little asteroid or ship that sneaks up behind you for you to crash into it (the exception being that some bosses can now fire small waves of ships). Last but not least, Beat Hazard Ultra introduces multiplayer to the game. This comes in the form of co-op and head to head modes which can be played online or offline with two controllers, or a controller and a keyboard. Did I mention that the game is much better on a game pad? The controls are good on a keyboard and mouse, but it's actually possible to lose your aiming reticule amongst all of the enemies, projectiles, and general flashiness. With a controller you don't have that problem, and are able to move and aim without worry (though to be fair the mouse is easier to aim more precisely at far off targets). As I was saying, there are two modes that can be played in multiplayer. In co-op mode two players share pretty much everything, score, lives, multiplier, bombs, etc. They work together to get the highest score they can. It's nice to be able to have another player to cover the opposite side of the screen for you, letting you mostly focus on the enemies nearest to you. Head to head I found more entertaining than co-op. Two players play essentially as if they were in single player mode, where nothing is shared (though stealing the pickups that another player drops on death is an option). The nice thing about it is that both players have infinite lives, so neither has to worry about failing or being let down when one of them dies too many times and the song ends abruptly. The players can't do anything to each other directly, so they simply compete to try to get the highest score. Winning Beat Hazard Ultra comes with over 20 new indie songs. These can be played in single player, but their main purpose seems to be to provide some consistency in what can be played in multiplayer. If two players have the exact same song, they can play it together, otherwise the included tracks are the only option. The most I've ever been able to play with anyone from my actual library was Stricken by Disturbed. It's not all that bad though, as the included tracks are mostly cool techno music perfect for generating challenging levels. Beat Hazard in itself was great fun, and the new Ultra DLC adds a lot to it. It feels like a whole new game. So much so that some might even miss the "simplicity" of the original. Fortunately, when launching the game you are given the option to choose between original and Ultra modes. There is a very noticeable difference when you go back and play in "classic" mode. With so much added, this is one very worthwhile DLC for those who already have Beat Hazard. For those who have not played the original, now is the perfect time to try it out. You can purchase the full game bundled with Ultra through Steam, and later on as DLC through the PSN store on the Playstation 3. The gameplay is incredibly smooth, and only made more awesome by the fact that you can play it to your favorite music. I fully recommend this game to anyone with a passing interest in music and simple yet addictive Geometry Wars style gameplay. It's everything you could want from a game short of a moving, cinematic experience. It's just plain damn fun.

There isn't really an objective in the game aside from maybe seeing how far you can go. You can play the game normally like any other shooter, flying around the levels, blasting enemies until you find the level exit. If you can't find the exit, you can stand still and a guide line will lead you to it. And when you get to that exit, you move "up" to the next level. Sounds simple enough, but the twist is that you can also go inwards, to find levels within enemy ships, power ups, and even yourself. The point of this is that you can alter the properties of the things you enter. Entering enemies allows you to pick up power ups within them to change their attack patterns. Entering power ups lets you pick up power ups within that power up to change it into a different one. And you can enter yourself to change what power ups you have on the current level, as you cannot use power ups on the level you get them, only on the one above it. Getting killed sends you into yourself automatically, but fortunately the level exit is usually very close by when this happens. What's more, there is no limit to how many things within things you can enter, changing power ups within enemies within yourself etc. etc. etc. Xzibit would be proud. I couldn't resist. The concept behind this game is really cool. The problem however is that the higher the level you get to, the more imbalanced it seems to get. From what I've played (up to about level 118), the power ups I've found never seem to go much higher than level 10, and I never seem to have enough health to survive the barrages of enemy bullets. When you die, your last power up (you can hold three) is replaced by health, and you get more base health based on how far you go (for the most part it seems to go up by one every 10 levels until around level 60 or 70. I'm sure it must go higher, but I seem to be stuck at about 8 health, so maybe it starts going up once every 20 levels at that point). You could also pick up more health increasing power ups, but each time you lose health that power up permanently goes down by one, unlike most other power ups like rate of fire, ricochet, and spread. I got the sense that the risk far outweighed the reward. Going inside of a power up to change it to something to help you defeat some difficult enemies just makes you encounter even more difficult enemies within that you would still need more power to defeat. The last straw was when I entered an enemy and all of the power ups that you can pick up within to change that enemy for better or worse were around level 30, when I'm lucky to find level 10s for myself. You shall not pass! All of this is not to say that it's a bad game, it really has some cool concepts behind it, but it just gets frustrating as you advance farther and farther into it. It's still pretty fun as a "quick fix" kind of game. Balance issues aside, there is fun to be had for the $8 asking price if you are looking for something different. And considering it was created by a single person, most of the issues can be forgiven in light of the more creative aspects of the game. UPDATE: Following this review, I had a chance to speak with the devloper, Jason Rohrer. He was able to provide some good insights into the game's design. You can find the impromptu Q&A here.

Your main goal in the game is to negotiate with the terrorist, fulfilling his demands to ultimately try to bargain with him for the safety of the hostages. His demands seem strangely noble, including fixing the clock tower, shutting down a porn shop, and helping a tour guide on his campaign to improve the town. To solve all of these problems, you have to go through a series of Zelda-esque puzzles (things like "talk to the guy to get the bucket to fill it with milk to..." etc. etc. etc.). What makes these tasks enjoyable is the grumpy monologue-ing of the protagonist, and the disturbing individuals you will have to converse with to further your goals. The game is presented in a crisp, animated style that works rather well. Using such basic gameplay concepts, it almost would have worked just as well as an animated series, though it understandably didn't go in that direction as it may have been more easily overlooked amongst all of the other crude-humored animation around these days. The game is incredibly short, and I managed to beat it in just over three hours without using any of the in-game hints (aside from maybe one or two "subtle" hints from an impatient friend watching me stream the game). I was hoping for more awesome moments like the ones you see in the trailers, with the dialogs between Hector and Lambert (as seen and ), but the most dialog you have with Lambert in-game is when you come to him to ask for advice on where to go next. Most of the game is Hector monologue-ing and having random dialogs with the citizen's of Clapper's Wreake. There aren't really any of the cinematic moments like you see in those trailers, other than maybe the intro and final cutscene. It's still an absolutely hilarious game, but a very short one. $10 is a bit high when it's a very short first part to a planned trilogy. That being said, most point and click adventure games are very short if you don't take too long to figure out all of the puzzles. If you're a fan of the point and click puzzle genre, you will still enjoy Hector: Badge of Carnage. If not, you can find videos of the game being played online if you just want to watch it for the great humor it contains.

I can't say much of the story other than what's shown in trailers and comprises about the first third to one half of the game, or I'd spoil some great plot twists. After the events of the first game you awaken once more as a test subject for Aperture Science. You are quickly greeted by a new character, an AI core with a British accent, who is going to help you along your way with some vague escape plan. This new character begins to establish some of the clever humor written into the game with his inane dialog and more-often-than-not poor suggestions. The dialog is a huge part of what makes Portal 2 great. There is a seemingly endless amount of witty dialog and funny comments to be heard. I often found myself refusing to advance to the next area until I had heard all of the dialog. As you probably saw in the trailers, GLaDoS is back, and she isn't too happy about what you did to her in the first game. She will test you once again, and this time she won't be so friendly about it. She really brings the claws out this time around, finding every opportunity to insult you in a hilarious fashion as you progress through the test chambers. But as I mentioned earlier, some huge plot twists occur, and the game seemingly changes entirely after the first half, which is more like the first game than the latter half is. It is during the second part where things really start to get interesting with some of the new mechanics introduced in the game. Though some of the new mechanics, such as lasers and cubes that can redirect them, are introduced early on, some of the even more interesting ones come later. Eventually you will be testing in new ways with gels, paint-like fluids that can cover surfaces and modify the way you interact with the environment. They are dispensed through tubes like the weighted cubes but flow fluidly, dripping or pouring out of them. Anything the gels touch becomes coated with it and take on new properties. There's orange Propulsion Gel, which allows you to run faster while on it; blue Repulsion Gel which makes everything bouncy; and white Conversion Gel, which makes most flat surfaces accept portals when covered by it. There are also tractor beams called Excursion Funnels which can convey objects, gels, and the player through the air, as well as Hard Light Bridges, bridges that can pass through portals to help you get to new areas. You use these new elements to accelerate, bounce, and portal your way through new obstacles in new areas of Aperture Laboratories. It's a refreshing change of pace and reinvigorates the game partway through. The original Portal could be beaten in roughly two hours if you were quick and knew all of the solutions to the puzzles. Though this isn't so bad when you consider that the first playthrough will take around 4-5 hours as you figure out all of the solutions for yourself, which is half of the fun. Portal 2 took me roughly 7 hours to complete, and it felt like a much bigger game than the first, with all of the dialog and detailed areas you pass through. Surely there will be people boasting 3 or 4 hour completion times, but rushing through the game like that would take out all of the fun of exploring all of the content that Valve squeezed into the game. A great new addition to Portal is co-operative gameplay. From the menu you can access a separate set of levels from the main story, designed to be completed by two players. Both players take control of the new Cooperative Testing Bots, Atlas and P-Body. These new test chambers provide another level of difficulty to the challenges, where you have to work with another player to solve them. The new challenges will require both players to use their separate pairs of portals together to find a way to the exit There are plenty of great griefing opportunities to be had along the way, such as cutting out the bridge from under a player crossing over a deadly grinder by placing your portal somewhere else, or making an excursion funnel push them into a crusher. Overall Portal 2 is a really fun game that has a great value to it. Awesome humor, great puzzles, and fun co-op make this yet another stellar title in Valve's already legendary line up. Don't let the misguided claims of short length and overpriced DLC fool you. The "DLC" is essentially just an item store akin to the one seen in Team Fortress 2, with items solely for aesthetics, most of which seem to be unlockable at random through normal gameplay. I fully recommend Portal 2 to anyone who has even the slightest interest in platforming or puzzle based gameplay. Valve has put a lot of work into creating something truly epic that will remind fans of the original Portal why they loved it so much.

The biggest change of course is that guns are much more prevalent. All of the enemies now wield guns ranging from AK-47s to RPGs, will attack you from a distance, and have humorously been renamed to the Goblincong. There is fitting new music that blasts as you make your way through the jungle, and now you have the mildly useful ability to crouch behind cover. You can still use all of your normal spells, but in the Vietnam Rescue Mission challenge you don't get most of your spellbook spells aside from the obligatory revive, haste and time warp which must be found throughout the level, and a new spell you can use to call in an airstrike. You probably won't have much time for anything fancy anyways with all the incoming gunfire. The rescue mission solo can be pretty challenging, as there are no checkpoints. I found myself using rock shields much more often, as opposed to only really using them to wall off dangerous ledges behind me. A useful strategy was to create a makeshift pillbox by surrounding myself with a rock shield and shooting powerful beam attacks out of it. I could manage to make it all the way to the final part of the mission in about 20 to 30 minutes, then get completely overwhelmed at the final part where you must hold out until the chopper arrives, with dozens of enemies focusing fire on my position. Co-op is a different story though. With three other players who somewhat knew what they were doing I was able to complete the mission, including all objectives (which mainly consists of blowing up buildings and towers, and rescuing soldiers), in around 15 minutes. It is a very short DLC and definitely left me wanting more. As I completed it, having played Magicka for the first time in a couple months, it made me think of how great it would be for something more substantial to be added, such as a new adventure mode with a full story and more than the handful of lines of dialog that Vietnam had. All of the humor was in the setting, with very little dialog. There is value in the replayability of the DLC, though, especially in the new arena challenge. I honestly found the new arena more entertaining than the rescue mission. It is structured the same as all of the other arenas, where you hold off against 20 waves of enemies and get random spellbook spells, weapons, and staffs from chests, but set in the new Vietnam setting with the new types of ranged enemies. It essentially changes the way you have to play in order to survive, when the enemies don't have to reach you to damage you. I found myself not using my favorite icicle shotgun or cannon spells from the main campaign much, although a strong beam attack is still one of the most effective ways of taking down enemies assuming you are properly shielded from gunfire. When I ended up in the arena with one other player, and we were both summoning hordes of lighting elementals, then protecting ourselves with rock barriers while setting off lightning storms that not only blasted apart the enemies, but healed the elementals at the same time, I was reminded of just how much fun Magicka could be. Magicka: Vietnam was short and entertaining, but seriously left me wanting more. I hope in the future an actual expansion pack is released which possibly adds a whole new adventure mode to the game. But for the low price of five dollars, this DLC adds a decent amount of new content to the game in the form of new challenges, particularly in the arena with the new types of enemies to face.