Seconds don’t count. A second is an eternity. It’s the ticks in the middle that make the difference. Every corner in TrackMania, every slight twitch of the controls, can potentially drop a perfect run into a searing abyss of failure and humiliation, leaving you tearing off your clothes, smearing the blood of a freshly killed sacrificial hamster across your chest, and leaping out in front of traffic in penitence for your crime. Or ...

Turn-based strategy games may seem dramatically old school next to their flashy RTS cousins (like Company of Heroes), but when they work as well as Stardock’s Galactic Civilizations II, we’ll happily enroll. GalCiv 2: Twilight of the Arnor is the second and final expansion pack for the critically acclaimed 4X (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) space conquest game, and it makes delivering one of the most fulfilling strategy ...

You’re expecting us to say “We’ve had the time of our life,” aren’t you? Probably “nobody puts Baby in the corner” too. Maybe something about a melon. It’s the only reason you’re reading this review. You don’t care if this rancid collection of minigames is any good or not. You’re just here for Swayze puns, you filthy slut. You do know the man’s currently dying of ...

If you ever need proof that an inspired idea and a little ingenuity are all you need to make a great game, this is it. Everyday Shooter is the product of a sole designer’s months of programming and music composition, and the resulting game is more innovative and addictively entertaining than many multi-million dollar professional studio games I could name.

ES plays like a psychedelic version of Asteroids: you pilot a ...

Superhero crossovers always disappoint fans, managing to alter each series’ winning formula enough to create a watered-down mess. In this sad tradition, we now have The Adventure Company’s latest point-and-click adventure game, Sherlock Holmes: Nemesis. You guide the iconic detective and his assistant, Dr. Watson, as they attempt to stop the infamous French thief, Arsene Lupin, from stealing several priceless British ...

Overclocked! Yeah! Rip off your safety switch - this is gonna be crazy, like an upturned hat filled with jumping murder beans. Rip out your teeth, Grandma - this is gonna get mucky. In fact, Overclocked is as low-octane as point-and-clicks get, turning the engine off and freewheeling downhill toward Lake Atmospherically Placid. This is not an inherently bad thing, and if you can stomach the game’s faults, of which there are two ...

Let’s play What If. What if Mr. Miyagi hadn’t been grooming the Karate Kid to win a martial arts tournament, but to clean cars really, really well? How about if in The Matrix, Morpheus had taken Neo into the virtual dojo to learn the calming benefits of yoga rather than showing him how to deliver kicks to the face?Soul-sapping dullness? Correct!

Ninja Reflex consists of six minigames that never get round to letting you be a ...

According to Spaceforce Captains, a new turn-based sci-fi strategy game from Croatian developer DreaMatrix, there’s a lot of debris in outer space. So much, in fact, that you can literally block an enemy spacecraft’s passage through the galaxy by parking your own ship in the narrow gap between two asteroid fields. See… he’s stuck! Got him cornered. ...

You may feel like you’ve played Seven Kingdoms: Conquest before - except that you actually enjoyed it the first time. This relaunch of the Seven Kingdoms series tramples on the good name of the original franchise and poorly imitates games that came out 10 years ago. If you took the Civilization series, the Age of Empires games, and WarCraft III, rolled them into a ball and then dipped it in bile, you’d get this terrible, terrible ...

With the heyday of pinball simulations on the PC ping, ping, pinging in my noggin like it was the mid-90s all over again, I really wanted to love Dream Pinball 3D. Forget that its title still hypes the fact that it’s “3D” well over a decade after 3D cards became standard operating equipment. Forget that Future Pinball, a beautiful, well-made pinball sim and table designer, can be downloaded for free from ...