GamesRadar - PC Reviews

Fable: The Lost Chapters (Review)

27/04/2006

Fable: The Lost Chapters improves the original Xbox RPG with an advertised 30 percent more content to the game. Much of the new stuff comes in the form of extra side quests, plus a tacked-on story quest at the end of the game that takes you to a new land (which we won't spoil). You start out as a young boy, living happily, until a vicious bandit raid wipes out your idyllic village. Orphaned, you are taken in by the Guild of Heroes, who train you to be a great warrior into your adulthood and ...

Fable: The Lost Chapters (Review)

12/10/2005

Can we ever be truly free? The fundamental point of a role-playing game is to give us choice: help or exploit, liberate or repress, give or take. But even the best RPGs fall short of offering real freedom, because a game must also have structure and a story to be fun. Be a hero? No thanks, I'd rather retire and grow carrots. Now that would be an RPG. Fable does its damnedest, though, and loftily aims to give you huge freedoms with your character, a nameless Hero in a fantasy world who is ...

Faces of War (Review)

27/09/2006

You wont construct bases, produce units, or command vast forces in Ubisofts latest WWII real-time strategy Faces of War. No, this time, the Great War takes its cues from a completely different genre. You're in charge of a single squad, and while you can direct units with traditional point and clicks, Faces of Wars unique Direct Control command allows you to move, aim and fire manually with the keyboard and mouse, much like you would in a first-person shooter. This feature works well with the ...

Fallen Earth (Review)

10/10/2009

Fallen Earth is essentially Fallout: the MMORPG. But then in some key respects, it’s definitely not. Icarus Studios’ ambitious online roleplayer is a game suffering from an identity crisis.

In terms of setting, the Fallout series is an invaluable touchstone. Fallen Earth shares more than the first four letters of its name with the grand old gentleman of post-apocalyptic RPGs. ...

Fallout 3 (Review)

28/10/2008

Nobody knows who dropped the first bomb, and nobody cares. 200 years have passed since a nuclear war between the U.S. and China reduced the planet to cinders, and humanity has only one concern: survival. The fallout not only destroyed civilisation, but twisted and distorted it. ...

Fantasy Wars (Review)

14/02/2008

Fantasy Wars is the game you pick last in a three-for-$10 budget deal and end up enjoying more than the game you picked second. Those silly orcs, elves, men, and goblins are at each others throats again. What was the spark this time? We honestly can’t remember. ...

Far Cry (Review)

30/03/2006

If Far Cry were a movie, youd never go see it. You are Jack Carver, former Special Forces commando and all-around generic badass in a Hawaiian shirt, involuntarily recruited by a fine-lookin woman to stop a mad scientist conducting genetic experiments on an isolated island chain. Um, yeah. Luckily, Far Cry is not a flick - its actually one of the best PC shooters youve probably never played. Far Cry really shines in its enormous outdoor environments. Levels look like something youd see on a ...

Far Cry (Review)

23/03/2004

The sea caresses the beaches like a supernaturally attentive lover. The sky is powder-blue, the sea a living mirror and, emerging from it, verdant isle after verdant isle. It's all so perfect it seems a shame to pull the trigger and bring a heaving bag of violence to this unearthly paradise. It's clear that we're in that stage of the gaming hardware cycle where the PC takes a lead over static platforms. While Deus Ex: Invisible War was hamstrung by a somewhat dour graphical aesthetic and a ...

Far Cry 2 (Review)

17/10/2008

When you first start playing Far Cry 2, you’ll be forgiven for thinking that it absolutely bloody hates you. Gunfire flies from nowhere, peppering you to pieces before you’ve even seen your attacker. Your fragile health bar drops to almost nothing within seconds. ...

Fatale: Exploring Salome (Review)

5/11/2009

From the weird-merchants behind The Path comes the game of Salome – the princess who asked Herod for John the Baptist’s head. It begins in clunky first-person, with you in a dungeon with nothing to do but be tormented by randomly appearing snippets from Oscar Wilde’s play Salome. ...

Fate of Hellas (Review)

25/04/2008

Ah, history. Stranger than fiction, and the source of the best stories. JoWooD, makers of variable quality games, rely on our love of the conflicts of the ancients to bring us a range of real-time strategies developed by WorldForge, who made Ancient Wars: Sparta. WorldForge, it seems, are keen on creating ponderously predictable RTS campaigns in a game engine that softly mimics Warcraft III and its ilk. Sadly for us, the game has nothing of ...

FEAR 2: Project Origin (Review)

10/02/2009

Back in 2005, little girls with lank, greasy hair were terrifying. Across the country, crowds of cinemagoers would stream out of showings of The Grudge and The Ring Two, kicking children in the face as a precautionary measure. It was riotous madness, and in the midst of it we were graced with FEAR – Monolith’s arse-clenchingly scary, spectacularly violent and needlessly bloody shooter. ...

FEAR Extraction Point (Review)

24/10/2006

To those unfamiliar with the first-person shooter F.E.A.R., the atmosphere may be unsettlingly supernatural and spooky, but the combat is akin to gun-humping the world. Youve got a sleek, voluptuous arsenal of maniacal phallic tools, erupting into the night. As your bullets mercilessly pound enemy-flesh, severing torsos, heads, arms and legs, the stray shells wreak equal demolition to your surroundings, crafting a visual symphony. Chunks of plaster, multicolored sparks, glass shards, smoke ...

FEAR First Encounter Assault Recon (Review)

5/05/2006

About two hours into FEAR I find myself in an open area. A rooftop, to be precise, criss-crossed with metallic steps and walkways. And on every raised section I can see patrols. Handily, there's also a low, flat wall to the left offering enough cover for me to make some headway. I'm halfway along it when I hear a shout of "Grenade out!" and an ominous chink from a few metres behind. I run - into a little cubbyhole just beyond the grenade's blast. Now I'm in trouble. FEAR's levels are never ...

FEAR Perseus Mandate (Review)

8/11/2007

Nov 8, 2007 FEAR has always been a game of two halves, both heavily involving people being cut into halves. On one side, perhaps excepting Crysis, it's the most cinematically kinetic shooter on the PC; on the other, a story-led atmosphere-fest. It's equal parts Hong Kong gun opera and Japanese horror. This (standalone) expansion pack rarely deviates from the - ahem - mandate, and this is both its strength and its weakness. When it does deviate, it mostly just lifts tricks from its peers. For ...

FIFA 07 (Review)

21/12/2006

It ain't easy managing your own soccer club. Between your bosses on the board, fans in the stands, scribes in the media and players on the pitch, it seems like everyone is working against you if even the slightest things go awry - which they often do in the Beautiful Game. Whether you're running a world-class side or a second-tier bunch of also-rans, the gods will conspire to make your life difficult. Of course, if you've got what it takes to build a champion, everyone loves you (until, of ...

FIFA 08 (Review)

19/10/2007

Oct. 19, 2007 So, what are our suggestions for FIFA 08, EA's latest effort at essaying our national sport? Well, first off: sort out the passing. In principle, it's great. Full 360-degree, any-weight passing is a great idea, but two things render it a pretty pointless inclusion. First, the twitchy, flicky inaccuracy of analogue pads make it impossible to direct passes with enough precision reliably and second, the regimented patterns that the AI players of both sides take up means your options ...

FIFA 09 (Review)

7/11/2008

There’s no denying that FIFA 09 encapsulates modern football. It’s got the image rights, with the sport’s global superstars gurning at you from the box and menus. ...

FIFA 10 (Review)

15/10/2009

There’s a basic problem with FIFA 10 on PC that needs to be addressed up front. EA’s developers don’t believe that PC gamers have machines capable of running the next-generation football engine that powers the game on the Xbox 360 and PS3.

Therefore we get a version that feels significantly last-gen, akin to playing on the PS2. ...

FIFA Manager 08 (Review)

14/12/2007

Dec 14, 2007 A dirty secret in the EA Sports pantheon, this has been slipped out with a minimum of fuss to offer a third way to budding Steve McLarens. While Football Manager and Championship Manager at least concentrate on the task in hand, FIFA Manager establishes itself as the football management game for people who don't like football. Having to select a husband/wife/sexual partner is banal enough, but when you're told playing golf will improve your relationship with the club president, ...