New Review: Din's Curse

Oh yes it's new review time and this week Din's Curse, a Diablo-esque rpg hack'n'slash adventure. It's always great to see independent developers create this kind of game, mainly because I love to play em!

So Din's Curse is what happens when an overbearing god decides to play further with the lives of mortals. Mostly by sticking them in dark dungeons and waiting for the hoards of golbins to attack and all probably just for the heck of it.

Personally I thought Din's Curse was...well you'll have to read the review to find out!

Click here to read the Din's Curse Review!

Looking forward to: Puzzle Quest 2

Curse those people at Infinite Interactive for not planning to release this on PC at the same time as the DS. Wait, I have a DS...but BAH!

For those that have never heard of Puzzle Quest, well it's basically an RPG adventure but the battles are played out on a match-3 (think zookeeper, bejeweled, etc..) type grid. It's highly addictive and seriously bad for your social life...if you have one. I recently started playing it again hence my newly found interest in the sequel.

As the previous one was eventually released on PC many months after the console releases (grr) I would expect the same to happen with the sequel. Anyway, here's a lovely trailer from GT to get you started - the original can be purchased on steam for some of your mortal money. I believe Jon reviewed the original a while ago...

I'm Defending Basingstoke! Revenge Of The Titans

And while the opportunity to let it burn was great, I felt I should at least play along.

What am I talking about? Why the demo of the upcoming "Revenge of the Titans" from Puppy Games, which isn't as Greek as it sounds. The Titans are infact an alien race of pixelated monsters that are invading the Earth, and the moon and possibly the whole solar system.

Only the demo is available right now, but by golly that's a lot of fun to play. It's almost classic tower defense in it's game-play but although you see where the enemies spawn from on the map it's not always clear in which direction they will travel. Resources, in the form of good old cash, is earned by killing enemies as well as building harvesting machines near crystal resource which you then have to click on when they've harvested enough and ran out of storage space.

Other twists to the genre are...well the guns run out of ammo and need to be restocked by clicking on them which takes time. They can also be destroyed by enemies which often doesn't happen in tower defense titles. Upgrades can be bought using cash saved up between levels. Also the cash you finished with from the previous level carries over to the next so it's in your interest to spend as little as possible each time.

I've also got to mention the awesome synthy-organ-baroque-but-modern style music which I thought was fab. It usually plays when the military leader chap is talking to you about the next mission.

All in all I was very impressed so far. It's not a finished game yet but you can pre-order for 50% off here and the free demo can be downloaded here. (thanks to RPS where I spotted this)

Also, here's a video:


PS: I didn't mean it about Basingstoke

Sword of the Stars 2

A game I'm very much looking forward to this year (or the beginning of next year) is Kerberos's Sword of the Stars 2.

The first game has become something of an obsession between my friends and I. In fact this started much earlier with games like Master Of Orion and it's excellent sequel as well as games like Homeworld and it's even better add-on Cataclysm. In fact Kerberos is made up of ex-employees of Barking Dog Studios who made Cataclysm so it's no surprise that they went on to create their own 4x strategy series.

Sword of the Stars has been a bit of a hit, though possibly not reaching headlines like big FPS games it has an amazing following mainly because Kerberos show a lot of support having supplied many an update as well as 4 expansions.

So when I first explained to my group of 4x playing friends that it was coming out in only a few months (up to a year) they started asking me all kinds of specific questions which, being a games reviewer I should really have known the answer to! So here is what I know so far:

The sequels full name is: Sword of the Stars 2 - The Lords of Winter. It's going to feature all 6 races from the first game and will add a new race called the Suul'Ka who are a mystical race and have, in the past, tampered with the Liir, Zuul and other races. The game will reveal a dark secret that ran through the previous game...ominous!

But for the real fans of the series I reckon the most exciting news bits are to do with the gameplay rather than the story. There's a new class of ship called the Leviathan and new levels of ship detail such as subsystems. Additionally the tech tree now starts with Fusion and will move past the Anti-Matter level cap of the previous game. Oh, and there's a new graphics engine which is always a good thing in a sequel ;)

So there we go, I hope I'm allowed to post the concept art that I have done but I'm sure I'll be told off in good time if not!

If you're a fan of any space strategy games and you've not already played sword of the stars, the complete collection will be out any time soon on GamersGate so look out for it!

New Review: Lead And Gold - Gangs of the Wild West

It's review time! And this week it's "Lead And Gold" a multiplayer team shooter game from Fatshark/Paradox Interactive.

You've probably gathered the theme of the game from it's name! I've been waiting to play this for a while and now I've had the chance I thought it was...well you'll have to read the review to find out!

Click here to read the Lead and Gold review!

Mac = PC!

With steam recently gracing the desktops of Apple machines everywhere, I've started to re-ponder this question again. Although it's been discussed at length by others before surely they've never been more similar than they are right now?

From a movement mostly driven by indie game creators, many games available on the PC are also available on Mac's. Nearly every games portal has dedicated mac areas like Direct2Drive and GamersGate. Steam however have taken this a step further where they've decree'd: Buy a game and (if it's supported on both platforms) get it for mac AND pc.

For me, who owns both, this is marvellous news. Scanning through my steam library on my mac I can see several games I can now have installed on both machines. I've not done any experiementing with having both active at the same time yet (presumably this is impossible?)

The problem I've now created for myself is - should PC Games and Reviews cover mac stuff? Is that far too removed from the Microsoft Windows Opperating System to be considered a PC? Everything else is identical as it shares with the PC the best control method for an FPS (there is no argument for this so don't even start!) And probably the best control method for casual gaming (is the iPhone better for this yet?)

With the work I'm doing redesigning the site I can't help but think I should have a mac section. Most games I review have a mac build available after all.

Something to think about, but while we do lets not forget that Portal is free for a week! Woot!

I am not an MMO! Craft Of Gods...

Craft of Gods has actually been running for quite some time, about six months. Since then I've been getting, I estimate, a million emails a day about it.

Exaggeration? Possibly, but the number of press releases I have seen about it make me feel I should at least mention it, even though I've never played the thing. As a rule I've avoided Mo-More-Pa-Ga's for the sole reason that I have little free time as it is and the chance of getting sucked into one of these fantasy based adventure doo-dids makes me nervous. And I'm far too cheap to pay any kind of additional monthly subscription to any game!

This youtube representation of the combat is probably a good indication of whether or not it's your thing:


So from that, to me, it looks like fairly standard fare for a game of it's genre. It's obviously hard to judge a game by it's videos and screenshots alone but as much as I'd like to say it looks good, well the models don't look too bad but I wasn't much impressed by the terrain or foliage.

I doubt it will make much of a dent in the WoW community but I'm sure it will attract a hardcore group of fans. Whether this will be enough to keep the servers running or not, only time can tell! There's certainly enough competition out there with plenty of variation to choose from with WoW, Warhammer Online, Guid Wars 2 is on it's way I believe, Global Agenda (sci Fi mmorpg) and then you have the indie titles like Dead-Frontier which is the closest I've been to getting drawn into such a game.

All in all if you're into these kinds of games why not give it a go. If you're quick you'll be able to sign up to the beta program before the full game gets released by the end of the month. And if you do, let me know what you think - even if it's just a one word recommendation/criticism! (nice words though please...)

Click here to visit the Craft Of Gods Site

More Site thoughts...

I'm a bit delayed in writing a review this week - mainly because of a control issue with the game I'd spent some time with. So I've switched games and will probably have something by the end of the week.

So in the meantime I'm still very much looking at upgrading the site to use nice community features from the Joomla web engine thing. I've been testing it out on the hardware the site runs on and it's nice and speedy so far, which was something I suffered from on a previous host & wordpress blog.

Obviously the other issue is that I don't have masses of time to spend on building a new layout using Joomla so I'm looking into templates and extendabiluty from 3rd parties. Currently I'm very keen on using GameBox & GamePoint from Jooforge (click the link for their demo site.) Obviously this is built around a site for all systems but I've started to contact them to see if I can adapt the template to fit my own needs.

The upshot of all this is that it makes writing and releasing reviews far less of a headache for me and also allows me to grant quick access to anyone else who feels like contributing. Joomla itself also deals with banners for advertising and account management and all sorts of other things that would take me months to write in my spare time.

So at the moment this is the current plan. I'm going to do a couple more reviews the old fashioned way but then will probably aquire the template and redesign the whole site!

The Future of the PC-Games-And-Reviews.com

I've been running the site for well over a year now, and generally it's been a very positive experience. There are over 70 reviews on the site and a handful of useful game guides which have turned out to be the most popular pages here! This has led to a fair visitor count and hopefully I've helped developers along the road.

However I'm incredibly ambitious and a fair visitor count just isn't good enough for me! So I've been thinking of other ways that I can fill a niche in pc gaming.

I really like what a fellow developer has done with gamelegend.com, as I used to spend quite a bit of time on Yahoo Answers helping people out with their game questions. So perhaps starting something like that would be good fun as well as being helpful.

The other option is starting a forum - which can be really good or bad depending on how many people sign up and start posting. Obviously a dead forum would be super depressing and probably lead to the end of the site while a hugely popular forum would be great but a lot of work.

Finally I could, if necessary, completely change the style and philosophy of the site to make it far more community orientated. There's quite a few sites like this knocking around these days and they seem to do quite well. I've already made appeals for people to help, but perhaps the lack of tools on the site itself to do this puts people off? A relaunch would be something positive I could shout from the rooftops about and would hopefully get more people interested in contributing and returning on a more regular basis.

While I ponder these ideas, I wonder if anyone else has any views?

Sail the Seven Seas: Ship Simulator Extremes!

You can say quite a lot about the games that Paradox Interactive publish, they range from fairly poor (fort zombie) to pretty good (Elven Legacy/East India Company) but one thing you can also say is that their range is extremely diverse!

Ship simulator Extreme is an example of their willingness to publish titles that I would imagine other big names ignoring completely in favour of war-time-fps concepts. Basically this game is going give you control over many different types and models of ships and allow you to sail them anywhere in the world...or at least plenty of famous places by the looks of things. Here's a short video they released exactly a year ago:

That's nearly all the information available at the moment, apart from a few new screenshots that have recently been released:

Will it be any good? No idea at the moment and it's probably not something I'll be eagerly waiting for. On the

other hand I can see this possibly being as popular as RailWorks if they can get to the right audience.

For more info, check out the latest press release here

Clover - A curious tale review!

It looks like I may be able to finish 2 reviews this weekend after all! Here's the first: Clover - A Curious Tale.

It's an graphical adventure extravaganza! A bit like adventure games of yore and I thought it was...well you'll just have to read the review!

Click here to read the Clover review!