Considering that first-person shooters have been around since the early-’90s, you’d think any modern version would, at the very least, get the fundamental mechanics right. But that’s sadly not the case with Homefront The Revolution (Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PC, Mac), an open world first-person shooter that has some intriguing ideas, but is ultimately undermined by some rather basic but easily avoided problems.
In games, your objective may be to save the galaxy or rescue the princess, but the real goal, every time, is to just stay alive. After all, you can’t save the galaxy or rescue the princess if you’re dead. But in the clever puzzle game Life Goes On: Done To Death — an updated and expanded version of 2014’s Life Goes On that’s now available for PlayStation 4 as well as PC and Mac via Steam — the only way to complete your objective is to go against thousands of years of evolution and human nature and let yourself die. A lot.
By injecting new mechanics into an old school shooter — or maybe they injected old mechanics into a new school shooter — the good people at ID Software have done something interesting with the new Doom (Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PC). Though how much you’ll enjoy this sci-fi first-person shooter will depend more on how much you appreciate those old school mechanics more than the new ones.
Much like their Borderlands games, for which this is an obvious spiritual successor, Battleborn (Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PC) is a sci-fi first-person that was designed by the good people of Gearbox Software to be a co-op game, but could be played solo if you really felt like it. But while some co-op games work well solo (The Division, Destiny), not all of them do (Rainbow Six Siege). And it’s somewhere in between, though leaning more towards the former, that we find Battleborn.
When thinking about movies that could inspire fun pinball tables, the Alien series is second only to Indiana Jones, and even then just because the former has that iconic scene with a giant ball.
But while we wait for Doctor Jones to get his butt in gear, we can enjoy the new Aliens Vs Pinball Pack for Zen Pinball 2 (PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, Vita), Pinball FX 2 (Xbox One, Xbox 360, PC), and Zen Pinball (iOS, Android, Amazon). Well, for the most part.
Dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov once said, “Fundamentals are the building blocks of fun.” It’s something I wish the good people at Remedy Entertainment had heard before they started working on their new third-person sci-fi shooter Quantum Break (Xbox One, PC) because the game’s flawed fundamentals are what keep it from being as much fun as it could’ve been.
Another day, another old game getting a makeover. This time it’s Shadow Complex Remastered, which is bringing an upgraded version of the 2009 side-scrolling, sci-fi shooter Shadow Complex to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. But while it doesn’t add enough to make it worth a double dip, the game does hold up rather nicely, especially for fans of the Metroidvania genre.
At a preview event for Tom Clancy’s The Division (Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PC), Creative Director Magnus Jansen said that while this open world, third-person shooter RPG was built for co-op, you could play it solo, and have a good time doing so.
Well, as someone who doesn’t play well with others, I wanted to see if this was true, so I played the game by myself. And while I found that the game does have some issues when you play solo, in some ways, it actually works better if you play it on your own.
One of the great things about the current and previous generations of video games is that you can not only get tons of old games for new systems, but you can also get new games in old genres. Case in point: Lumo, an isometric arcade adventure being made by Triple Eh? Ltd., which Rising Star Games will release on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Vita, and PC this April. To find out how it fully embraces the spirit of those ’80s games, but with modern tenets, I spoke to Game Director Gareth Noyce as he played his way through the opening rooms.