Miner Wars 2081

• Six Degrees of Freedom
• Likeable Player Character
• Missions Work Well

• Shallow Gameplay
• Poor Graphics and UI
• Some Deadly Bugs

Space Mining and Ship Blasting in Six Degrees of Freedom!

Black Snow

• Challenging
• Thought provoking
• Scary

• Can be too hard
• Still feels half lifey
• Abrupt ending

Frozen, alone, and afraid, the immersion of Black Snow will keep you wondering what lurks in the shadows.

Painkiller Hell & Damnation

• Hilariously fun
• Great metal soundtrack
• Varied and memorable levels
• Amazing arsenal of weapons
• Fantastic Graphics

• Lame boss fights
• God awful story
• About 5 hours long
• Lack of PC specific options
• Empty Multiplayer servers
• Lack of modability

Hellishly entertaining! If your interests include blowing up monsters from hell, collecting souls for the Grim Reaper, gigantic boss battles and other demonic activities; Then buy this game!

Natural Selection 2

• FPS and RTS blend
• Immersion
• Detail
• Lighting
• Balance

• Learning curve
• Minor bugs
• Loading times

Natural Selection 2 is naturally addictive.

007 Legends

• Shooting Gameplay is okay
• Single Player weapon unlock system
• Sound is very well done

• Anything non-shooting related
• Enemy AI
• Controls
• Menus

James Bond returns in a journey down memory lane.

Chivalry: Medieval Warfare

• A new way to experience first-person combat
• Satisfyingly brutal
• Fun and interesting game modes

• Fighting multiple people can be frustrating
• A lot of uninteresting environments
• Serious frame-rate issues

A whole new FPS experience! The First Person Sworder! Sounds like a lot of fun, and it is... sometimes.

Deadlight

• Pretty graphics
• Good story
• Non-usual

• Repetitive gloomy environments
• Wonky controls
• short

Beautifully sullen, Deadlight side scrolls you through a zombie apocalypse using parkour, guns, and a very compelling story.

Medal of Honor Warfighter

• Pretty entertaining campaign
• Driving sequences are worth a look
• Multiplayer has many class options

• Campaign is often highly derivative
• Multiplayer feels muddy and unpolished
• Multiplayer console interface is frustrating

The sequel to the reboot of the franchise that came before Call of Duty now becomes a shadow of its successor. Confusing? Read on!

Of Orcs and Men

• Unique and engaging story
• Some very nice looking environments
• An inventive new way to control two characters at once

• Some rather stale, linear environments
• Repetitive Combat
• Shoehorned F-bombs

Taking clichéd settings & plots and turning them on their head! The complete switch in roles compared to the Tolkien depiction of the heroic Men and savage Orcs is the main “hook” of the game.

Silent Escape

• Complete set of weapons and a large cast of enemies and environments
• Well paced encounters and well constructed environments

• Atmospherically fails to live up to the standards of the Half-Life series
• Very little interesting additional content

A not so silent escape from the Combine. In the absence of an Episode 3, we must content ourselves with the trappings of the mod community in the form of Silent Escape from developer Pro-Bones.

Payday: The Heist

• Heists are varied and replay-able
• Fantastic music and sound design
• Very fun co op
• Hostage trading system
• Solid shooting

• Less than average graphics
• Weapon and equipment customization leaves much to be desired
• Laughably bad voice acting
• Could do with more heists

Criminally fun! Payday's gameplay is an intense mix of first person shooting and hostage control which makes for some very interesting situations...

Primal Carnage

• Dinosaurs vs Humans
• Classes are well balanced and have good variety
• Pretty fun for a short time

• Repetitive Gametype
• Repetitive Map Design
• Questionable visuals
• Lacking in content and features

Spend some quality time picking up players and tossing them into chasms or filling your scope up with a Rex's head and firing until the clip is empty.

Ravaged

• Gameplay is simple but has depth for those interested
• Great map design
• Interesting vehicles and weapons
• Potential for 64 players
• PC friendly graphics settings

• Small infantry only maps are rather dull
• Lack of engineer or ammo restock class
• Incredibly small player base
• Steep price point compared to other competing titles

A Mad Max experience that Rage's multiplayer simply could not come close to satisfying.

Map Review: de_citato_venice

• Impressive visuals,
• Accomplished architecture,
• Fast-paced structure,
• Nice ambience,
• Squishy water-melons!

• Some lighting/clipping glitches,
• Overly simplistic structure,
• Irritating invisible-wall clipping,
• Cramped spawns,
• Under-developed 3D skybox.

In this review I look at one of the earlier maps, submitted to GB shortly after the release of CS:GO

Dishonored

• Innovative and varied combat, limited only by your imagination
• Choices that change the way the game plays from then on
• Beautiful art direction
• Unique setting

• Binary Good or Bad ending.
• Fairly generic plot
• Gives freedom to play however you want, but only rewards stealth

"Ooh" I said aloud, wringing my hands maniacally, "this could be fun"

XCOM: Enemy Unknown

• Tactical Gameplay that is easy to learn but difficult to master
• Vast replayability
• Customization and choices that matter

• The story is lacking, and fairly generic
• Difficulty settings seem to only alter the enemy’s accuracy
• Bad decisions early on can ruin the game for you later

These days it seems like almost every big title is a remake, reboot, or re-imagining of an older franchise.

Map Review: de_elysium (GB mapping contest winner)

• Great concept,
• Strong architecture,
• Good layout,
• Fun gameplay,
• Nice visuals,
• Custom elements and extras (models, overview, loading screen etc)

• Unadventurous texturing,
• Some lack of detail,
• Release format for servers. (content not embedded, no res file)

In the first my new in-depth map reviews for GB, I will be looking at de_elysium, winner of the Red Planet Mapping Contest

Borderlands 2

• Maintained style
• Humour
• Story
• Immensity
• Variety
• Cooperative

• Minor bugs
• Difficulty balance

This game revolutionises the revolution of guns (and other stuff).

Borderlands

• Stylish
• Loot system
• Humour
• Weapons
• Cooperative

• Shallow story
• Repetition
• Bland characters

This game revolutionises guns.

Miner Wars Arena

• Easy to use controls
• Balanced Gameplay and Weaponry
• Smart AI/Path detection
• Destructible Terrain
• Ranking System with Social Media integration.

• Lower end of the scale graphically
• Not a lot of options resulting in the soundtrack going unheard most of the time
• No online multiplayer
• No story mode
• Incredibly quick deaths