Locke & Key: Omega #1 Review

This is it. The beginning of the end. The tension Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez have built up throughout this series couldn’t be more gripping. I just can’t get enough of it. It’s like crack. Or so I hear. Tyler, Kinsey, and everyone else have a false sense of security because they don’t know Dodge has taken control of Bode. And he’s got all the most powerful keys! This series will be the death of me if it makes my heart beat any harder. But please let me die only after I read the final issue of Locke and Key: Omega.

Gabriel Rodriguez’s art looks unlike anything you’ve seen before. It’s gorgeous and detailed as can be, and every re-read rewards you as there always seems to be more visuals to take in. His art is like a demented Where’s Waldo? book because whenever you find the hidden gem it’s usually something crazy freaky. Just look closely at the second to last page. No, closer. Yeah, there. WHAT THE FRAK? Now you know what I mean.

Hill doesn’t waste a panel as he uses Scot’s video project to let the characters shine with some heart-wrenching confessions. This issue goes light on the dark magic stuff, but we’ve been with Tyler and Kinsey so long that hearing them shed light on key moments in this story’s history proves to be just as good as any of the key stuff. Hill has stacked the elements of his story -- Dodge, the keys, Tyler, Kinsey, Bode, the cave -- like a game of Jenga. You can see that they’re all about to crash down in a horrifying way, but no matter how harrowing it looks, you can ‘t stop reading.

Joshua writes for IGN. Follow him on Twitter @JoshuaYehl or on IGN, where he will air-bend, Force-push, and optic-blast his opinion into your brain.

Source : ign[dot]com

Anna Review

I like the exhilaration that comes from being chased; the tension and rise of adrenaline that comes in the moments where my character is hiding from a stalking enemy; the way my hands shake as I let out a stifled breath upon reaching safety. Whereas so many games make you feel like you’re untouchable, horror games often strip you down to the most basic fight-or-flight impulse, stoking your primal instinct to run the hell away.

Anna doesn’t give much of an introduction. Your character simply starts out at an abandoned house, solving puzzles in a serene garden in order to gain entry into a twisted home that holds a key to the bizarre dreams you’ve been having. Something is wrong with this house, and you need to find out how you’re connected or, at the very least, escape.

It starts off scary. You wander around the environment in a first-person perspective looking for interactive objects to pick up, examine and sometimes combine with inventory items to create new things. Performing these actions triggers events within the house: spirits throw objects, random apparitions appear to startle you as you turn a corner and voices call out from the shadows. It’s unsettling to say the least, and if, like me, you scare easily, you’ll probably need breaks to dry your sweaty palms.

That is until you realize you really have nothing to worry about. You see, while a few big scares occur throughout the short story, the fear-inducing moments become neutered when you realize you can’t die, lose or otherwise find yourself in an irreparable situation. Suddenly the unknown spirits that taunted me went from beings of unknown and frightening power to uninteresting annoyances; spirits who were just out to slow me down rather than do me any actual harm. As the umpteenth can raised into the air and slammed into my head my adrenaline continued to pump, but only out of frustration with Anna’s anger-inducing puzzles.

OK, not all of Anna’s puzzles are unnecessarily confusing or frustrating, but the ones that are drag down the entire experience. Regularly your character encounters “puzzles” that are really just trial and error situations. Just like classic point-and-click adventure games of yesteryear, Anna often puts you in places where all you can really do is start combining unlikely items until you figure out the baffling combination the designers intended.

Bizarre polish issues and poor interface don’t help here, either. Opening up your inventory, clicking use on an item and then closing your inventory before trying to combine it with something in the environment is tedious. Now imagine doing this time and time again as you start randomly combining things in a fit of desperation after you encounter yet another obtusely designed puzzle – it’s maddening how clumsy and unintuitive it feels. Times when you know a puzzle’s solution, but you aren’t combining items in the exact order or way Anna intends are even more excruciating; combine A with B to get C and you win, but combine B with A and you get something unusable. Pixel hunting for the exact spot you can click to do something “right” isn’t rewarding, and makes the relatively short story of Anna drag unnecessarily.

Anna is billed as an experience that adapts to what you do, and that, “features three ending according to how much the character has gone deep into madness,” but that description is a bit misleading. Really what the team means is that if you interact with certain doors at specific times then Anna will end. If you want to get the ending where the credits actually scroll, the one with the most fulfilling (and least confusing) narrative, then you’ll either need to randomly make the right decisions or read a guide.

Source : ign[dot]com

Wreckateer Review

On the surface, simplicity and accessibility seem to be the common denominators defining casual gaming's best -- really, what makes go-to games great is their mastery of instant tension and speedy release. Few things are more stimulating in games than the sensation of not knowing whether you'll succeed or fail. An excellent title gives players of any skill the control -- and a splash of luck -- to complete any task.

Wreckateer is an excellent example of a game understanding everything that makes experiences like it such fun to play. The premise and execution are simple and accessible: you aim and fire various ammo at destructible castles. The Kinect-powered airborne attack input is a terrific balance of anxious waiting and satisfying result. You rely on yourself as much as fortuitous physics when you make your mark. Wreckateer has all the necessary components to make an amazing casual puzzle game, yet it falls just short of "irresistible addiction" and instead settles for "amusing distraction."

As an intern under two veteran wreckateers, you're learning their methods to demolish goblin-infested castles with a ballista. The story starts and stops there, and it's all the excuse you'll ever really need. Firing simple rocks escalates into more elaborate ammunition types, and each requires careful aiming and delicate babysitting right up until the moment it makes something crumble.

Even as you aim for dynamite strapped to walls, there's a strange, soothing calm to Wreckateer's demolition. The wait between attack and result is a long one, and you're involved throughout all of it. You'll fling your arms about to add spin to your shots, detonate bombs, rip one rock into four small ones, and float flying bullets through points collectibles. Each time your shot makes its mark, there's a satisfying crunch as castles crash to the ground, onto each other, or into groups of their evil occupants. Watching the points rack up alongside badges earned for risky shots or wrecking houses reinforces that good feeling, even more so when you've filled the multiplier bar. It's a stellar feeling after 15 seconds of wondering whether or not you're going to get where you want.

Blow this bomb beneath the bridge to take it out at its support.

You never know which four to five shot types -- such as a winged projectile you can steer with your arms and the aforementioned chunk that splits into four smaller stones -- you're getting when you start a stage for the first time, and part of the puzzle is figuring out which serves the best purpose, and in what order. This keeps each of the 60 levels, spread across four hours or so, more interesting than the actual levels. There's no identity to any of the 10 worlds. Some have snow. Some have canyons. Some have a darker hue. But the actual layouts aren't very interesting in the grand scheme of things There's only so much you can do with assorted layouts of walls and towers, and Wreckateer exhausts its options early. Although it's entertaining to break stuff, you'll want to do it in very short bursts so it doesn't blur together.

Late in the campaign, Wreckateer mixes things up with new variables. Sometimes you need to collect floating power ups to cross a canyon or punch through multiple towers. Without using this stuff, you'll fail, and failure is Wreckateer's greatest enemy. Certain stages makes it suddenly -- and incredibly -- hard to meet the bronze medal's minimum requirements to proceed. By the time I finally earned it, I didn't know what I'd done differently, and I didn't want to keep playing. It's frustrating to go from having a good time lazily smashing stuff and solving puzzles to replaying the same stage a dozen times.

Kick back, relax, smash.

Even if it weren't a cute and fun puzzle game, Wreckateer's use of Kinect is a beacon of hope that this device is worth using. Wreckateer employs and understands a few basic gestures, so there's little room for you to fail because the sensor wasn't listening. Wreckateer knows the limitations of the device and leverages them to its advantage. You can squeeze some precision out of broad movements, which future motion games could learn from.

Source : ign[dot]com