PC Previews

The shooter genre is so crowded right now, it’s hard to tell one Billy Buzzcut shouty soldier from the next. Luckily, with playable characters who all look like circus acts and the most intuitive movement system we’ve seen since Mirror’s Edge; Brink shouldn’t have too much trouble standing out from the generic crowd. Recently, we got hands-on with the game in a few four-player co-op sessions. We were even fortunate enough to have developer Splash Damage’s head honcho Paul Wedgewood guide us through the action. So if you like the idea of freerunning clowns murdering each other with hi-tech weaponry, we suggest heading inside.

We had our doubts about Batman: Arkham City. Would it live up to our 2009 Game of the Year? Could it possibly maintain what was so great about Arkham Asylum while making the transition into the genre of the open world game? What about the relatively short development time? Could they possibly make a game as fleshed out and polished in just about a year and a half? As it turns out, yes. Yes they can...

In case you missed it, we previously talked about how Homefront’s a sort-of videogame remake of Red Dawn in our earlier preview, where we focused on the first level of the single-player campaign as well as several hours of play in the multiplayer. Homefront is a prime example of incongruous single-player and multiplayer components: the former is a brutal, politically savvy meditation on the ramifications of the US being the world’s sole superpower, while the latter is a piece of pure entertainment where you shoot other people over the internet with miniature rockets from remote-controlled helicopters...

Above: Telltale’s game looks ready to cut to the core of what we loved about the first Jurassic Park film, but it’s QTE-centric gameplay may leave some fans wanting more

Telltale Games has come a long way since it was a 15-man operation with Telltale Texas Hold’em to its credit. Since then, the studio’s been fighting the good fight, keeping the point ‘n’ click adventure genre alive with many successful episodic series and digital releases. Now, the company is pulling out the big guns with its sights set on big licensed properties, like The Walking Dead, Fables, Back to the Future, and Jurassic Park. We recently got some brief hands-on time with Jurassic Park – and from what we’ve seen so far, it looks like the game’s QTE-centric gameplay may divide fans of the film…

It’s been nearly fourteen years since news of a proper sequel to Duke Nukem 3D was first announced way back in 1997. Since then, the game’s made its way to development hell and back again. But with a solid release date set for May 3rd, 2011, Duke Nukem Forever is finally about to become a reality now that the torch has been passed on to developer Gearbox Software.

Interest in the long awaited return of gaming’s manliest hero is almost palpable. But will Duke Nukem Forever mark the triumphant return of oldschool shooters with attitude or will it just feel old? Will Duke charm the pants off you like he did back in the day, or will the game’s low-brow humor fall flat with the facepalm-ery of a crude Postal punch line? If you’ve got questions, we’ve got answers. After playing through the first two hours of Duke Nukem Forever, we’ve chronicled highlights of the best and worst from our experiences here for your reading pleasure…

Five minutes. Five minutes of a very short demo was all gamers needed to decide that, yep, they were definitely interested in whatever twist on first person shooters Bulletstorm had to offer later this February. Of course, it helped that those five minutes could be repeated over and over and over again, each time played with an incredibly different – and incredibly sadistic – approach.

But those are still only five minutes of an hours-long campaign. If that much diversity and insanity can be packed into a demo, what might happen through the course of the entire single player story? Having finished Bulletstorm last month, I can give you an idea. Here's a sample of what I experienced during just the first third of the game…

First the good news... Woo hoo, the first trailer of DICE's brand new Battlefield title has finally emerged from cover confirming that one fo the best multiplayer experiences is indeed getting a full sequel in 2011. The bad news? There's barely anything else of interest in this sneak-peek trailer. Still interested? Then click the image above to see it now. 

Dungeons is coming out next week, and we bet you aren't even paying attention to it, but with such a interesting concept you should . When you’re the blood spilling, war mongering overlord of a dark dungeon domain, girl trouble should be the furthest thing from your mind. After all, there are pesky heroes to squash, unholy minions to summon, and dank corridors to spruce up with nefarious accoutrements. But you know what they say about a woman spurned. Dungeons’ humorous tongue-in-cheek campaign kicks off with your scantily-clad winged demon babe girlfriend leaving the gates to your abode wide open, letting heroes swarm right in...

After spending way too much time playing a pre-beta build of Total War: Shogun 2, it seems that Creative Assembly’s latest entry in the Total War series is shaping up to be the best one yet. Part real-time, part turn-based, Shogun 2 continues to carry the torch of the series’ hybrid gameplay, walking the line between both genres with gorgeous visuals and epic battles...

A few of us at GR are huge RTS nerds, and a few of us are MMO nerds, and yes, there is some crossover. We’re of the firm belief that any genre could be made into an MMO, and we’re dismayed that nearly every MMO out there is an RPG. We’ve pondered how it could be possible to make an MMORTS, and it hasn’t been easy to imagine a persistent world populated by players all fighting each other for world domination – especially since there’s the huge hurdle of how to deal with a player’s base when they’re not logged in. Age of Empires Online tackles this problem by not actually tackling it at all, and the result is a game that tenuously connects itself to the MMO moniker. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing at all – it’s just different from what we expected from an MMORTS, but then that’s because we favor multiplayer over single-player in RTS games...