GamesRadar - Reviews

Pac Man World 3 (Review)

May 2, 2006

You'd think after watching the truly awful opening cutscene that we'd be primed to give this a damn good kicking. You'd think after seeing how painfully unimaginative it all is that we'd be hard pushed to play it for more than five minutes, but for some very strange reason we found ourselves enjoying it. It's brainless, yes. It's laughably simple too - but then maybe that's what's so nice about it. Still, you can't escape the fact that there's a shopping list of things that are very wrong with ...

Pac N Roll (Review)

Sep 8, 2005

Pac-Man's been around for ages, but now he's going around like never before. Balls to complicated action heroes with legs and arms - Pac-Man manages with nothing but his pokey little nose and a permanent grin on his face. Pac 'n' Roll is actually quite similar to Super Monkey Ball. It's less subtle, but just as exhausting as you roll Pac-Man by rubbing the stylus over him on the lower screen, like a track-ball. A dash move is activated by swiping at him with the stylus and letting your stroke ...

Pac Pix (Review)

Apr 14, 2005

Draw Pac-Man - the sharp angle of the mouth, then his round body - and he'll animate and move off in the direction you drew him facing. Guide him towards the roaming ghosts by drawing walls in front of him: the direction you draw the wall is the direction in which he travels.That's the simple premise behind this game, and it captivated the crowds when the DS was first playable at last year's E3. But there's more to Pac-Pix than that. It's much cleverer than we originally thought. Although ...

Pacific Storm: Allies (Review)

Jan 29, 2008

Another epic RTS/simulation hybrid covering the fight between the Allies and the Japanese in the Pacific during WWII comes nipping at the heels of Battlestations: Midway. Unlike its fun-but-slightly-dumbed-down arcadey cousin, the emphasis in Pacific Storm: Allies is on the astounding scale of the conflict, and on fiddly real-time strategy rather than shooting things to pieces in person. The concept is great: a Total War-style strategic recreation of the war, with you controlling all building ...

Pac-Man Championship Edition - Xbox Live Arcade (Review)

Jun 7, 2007

Pac-Man Championship Edition needed to be released for 400 points, not the 800 Namco's asking us for. In fact, better yet - Pac-Man Championship Edition needed to be released as some kind of expansion pack for the original Pac-Man or Ms. Pac-Man, both of which have been on the Xbox Live Arcade service for months ...

Pac-Man World Rally (Review)

Aug 30, 2006

You know a video game character has faded from relevance when its "intellectual property" spits out a rally racing game in frustration. For every Mario Kart there are piles of pitiful cash-in dreck that go from the development cradle directly to the bargain bin grave. Pac-Man World Rally, surprisingly enough, bucks this trend to a certain degree, by somehow managing to salvage archaic ideas like dot-munching and power pellets into elements that don't seem entirely out of place. Each character ...

Pac-Man World Rally (Review)

Aug 30, 2006

Pac-Man World Rally (Review)

Aug 30, 2006

Pac-Man - Xbox Live Arcade (Review)

Aug 9, 2006

A true coin-op classic, Pac-Man ushered in the wave of non-shooting "cute" games in 1980 and gets credit as gaming's first pop-culture phenomenon. That's great, he's historically important - but do you still want to hang out with him? Maybe not. Pac-Man is groundbreaking but ultimately pretty boring. As you race around gobbling dots, the maze never changes; only the speed of the monsters, the length of their vulnerability and the routes they take deviate between stages. The game also suffers ...

PAIN - PS3 Network (Review)

Dec 3, 2007

For whatever base reason, there are few things in this world that are more purely hilarious than watching other human beings hurt themselves in spectacular ways. It's the reason we watch NASCAR crashes, gruesome skateboard wipeouts and reruns of Jackass. It's also the reason that PAIN, a downloadable PlayStation Network game about flinging yourself at high speeds against buildings, is so relentlessly entertaining. The setup is simple: you've got one indestructible idiot, one giant slingshot ...

Painkiller (Review)

May 27, 2004

Cover me! Sweep room! Ruffle my hair! Tie my sodding shoelaces! The beasts from Painkiller - a staunchly straight-up FPS from Polish newbies People Can Fly - would delight in sucking your eyeballs slowly from their sockets if you even contemplated going all team-based on their asses.Such is the ferocity of the enemy assault, the whole concept of AI almost becomes irrelevant. And before anyone goes off blubbing to Tom Clancy, this is actually not a bad thing. As you're bum-rushed by a constant ...

Painkiller: Hell Wars (Review)

Aug 9, 2006

It's been a while since the demonic first-person shooter Painkiller and its expansion pack landed on the PC, and though its endless waves of Hell's minions, enormous boss monsters and reactive physics might've been the bee's knees then, the intervening years have taken some of the fire out of the Xbox edition, Painkiller: Hell Wars. Our hero, unburdened with the trappings of personality, slaughters Lucifer's troops with weapons that sound more interesting than they are. Sure, pinning a goon ...

Painkiller: Overdose (Review)

Dec 5, 2007

Dec 5, 2007 This is a game that opens with concept art of a 68-year-old transvestite in purple makeup and horns, uses the word ‘hate nine times in the interminable intro movie, and begins with some of the worst FPS combat weve seen in our career. But eventually, bunnyhopping around the games ugly morons, firing its copycat weapons and enduring your characters cringingly unfunny and excruciatingly repetitious one-liners gets surprisingly compelling. Even after load times that the ...

Panzer Tactics DS (Review)

Jan 18, 2008

The ravages of portable war have been largely limited to cartoon battles between fictional forces until now, but Panzer Tactics DS lets you twist your noodle on 30 missions pulled from World War II. Panzer Tactics DS isn't for tactical newbies, with a ramping difficulty that makes each of three 10-mission turn-based campaigns progressively more complex without becoming too brutally frustrating. Tutorials teach the basics, but there's no substitute for getting a few losses under your belt for ...

Paper Mario 2 (Review)

Feb 15, 2006

Kidnapped again? Honestly, this must be the hundredth time. You'd have thought the Princess would have grown some common sense by now. Yes, she's vanished again, but this time it isn't what you're thinking. And it probably isn't the kind of game you'd associate with Mario, this being an RPG and all that. However, it's still a smashing piece of Nintendo fun. It's the sequel to an N64 title from a few years back, although you certainly don't need to have played the original to get maximum ...

Paperboy - Xbox Live Arcade (Review)

Feb 15, 2007

The hits just keep on coming on Xbox Live Arcade. The latest coin-op classic to hit the service is a touching tale of a boy, his bicycle, and an unrelenting urge to smash all things breakable with tightly-rolled wads of tree byproducts. Paperboy was - and still is - an awesome game. At least, if youre looking for a short diversion... say, something you might spend $0.25 a pop for. Paperboy on the 360 is an authentic recreation of the mid-80s arcade machine, save for the absence of the ...

Paradise (Review)

Jun 6, 2006

When was the last time you found yourself stranded and confused in Africa? Paradise, the latest point-and-click adventure from the creator of the cult hit Syberia, gives you that chance. Having been shot down over the country of Maurania, a young woman awakens with amnesia in the harem of a local prince. Not knowing her own real name, she calls herself "Ann Smith" after the author of a book on Mauranian wildlife that was found with her at the crash. And this, really, is where the problems ...

PaRappa the Rapper PSP (Review)

Jul 17, 2007

Dont be fooled by the cutesy, sun-shiney graphics: PaRappa the Rapper will kick your ass - its as hard as nails. So hard, itll destroy your self-belief. Were you ever any good at games? Ever? Apparently not, youll think, as the option to try again pops up for, like, the thirteenth time. Its hard in a way that makes your fingers freeze up (and not because of PSPs iffy control layout) as your mind starts interpreting Triangle as Square and vice versa. You panic. You screw up. And theres that ...

ParaWorld (Review)

Sep 29, 2006

The most obvious difference between ParaWorld and the rest of the stagnating real-time strategy genre is its bizarre setting: a world where dinosaurs remain. Its ham-fisted, borderline satirical storyline is a bit embarrassing, as is some of the accompanying voice-over work, but such complaints are small potatoes compared to everything this game gets wonderfully right. Everything about ParaWorld just screams low-brow fun, from the colorful dinosaurs and huge indigenous animals your troops can ...

Pariah (Review)

Jun 9, 2005

There comes a time when the world confronts you with deep, meaningful, searching questions, that only you can answer. Who am I? What is my life all about? Is it wrong to go five days without changing into a clean pair of underpants? (We'd have to say yes to that.)But, perhaps most important of all: does it bother me that the game I just shelled out thirty five notes for lasts only seven hours? Seven. You could spend longer in the bath. It's the classic tale of 'just as things were getting ...