GamesRadar - Xbox Reviews

Painkiller: Hell Wars (Review)

9/08/2006

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 ...

Pariah (Review)

9/06/2005

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 ...

Pirates (Review)

21/04/2006

This remake of the 1987 PC classic isn't so much one game as an extremely well put together collection of simple but fun minigames. All of the different modes in Sid Meier's Pirates!: Live the Life have completely different gameplay, but with the help of Disney-style pirating (pillaging, but no raping) and swashbuckling they weave together to form a highly entertaining experience. As a young Orlando Bloom-esque character whose family is sold into slavery when your father couldn't pay his ...

Playboy: The Mansion (Review)

16/03/2005

Breasts are lovely. Women can healthily celebrate them, men can healthily appreciate them, and they also serve practical storage purposes. Certainly they are one of the most impressive parts of human anatomy. But can their abundance improve a poorly designed game? You only have to take one look at Playboy The Mansion to see that no, they can't.Based around the life of the eponymous mammary-oriented magazine and its founder Hugh Hefner, Playboy plays like an exceptionally limited version of The ...

Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones (Review)

28/02/2006

While playing Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, youll likely keep asking yourself the same question: Just who the hell would build all this stuff, and why? But never mind that all the games structures are wildly impractical or that half the buildings in Babylon are filled with giant saw blades and retracting ledges. What matters is that it's fun. And after the dark, brooding Warrior Within, "fun" is something this series sorely needed. Picking up where the last game left off, Two Thrones ...

Project Snowblind (Review)

27/04/2006

Playing as a biologically-altered super-soldier in a futuristic war hardly counts as a groundbreaking premise (see: Halo and Halo 2), but if you give Project: Snowblind a chance, you'll find it to be the very definition of a jack-of-all-trades first-person shooter: it does everything well but nothing brilliantly. Strapping on the boots of critically injured soldier Nathan Frost, whose name is unfortunately as generic as his character, you're thrown on the war veteran scrapheap, so to speak, ...

ProStroke Golf: World Tour 2007 (Review)

29/09/2006

The biggest problem with golf videogames right now is that the games at the top of the heap are filled with gimmicks: comically effective "spin" buttons, and super-powered shots that'll drive the golf ball farther and faster than humanly possible. Even the Tiger Woods series, for all its visual authenticity, is far from realistic. ProStroke Golf goes the other direction, concentrating more on the real-world dynamics of the golf swing and breaking it down to the basic level for the player. ...

Psychonauts (Review)

4/05/2006

At some point in their lives, every person on Earth has looked at another person (usually a significant other, in our experience) and wondered, either silently or aloud, "What in the name of eggs and waffles could be going on in that clearly malfunctioning brain of yours?" Psychonauts is a brilliant platform/action adventure that gives us the answer to that question - from the inside out. Each level of Psychonauts actually takes place inside the mind of a different character. Moreover, because ...

Punisher, The (Review)

21/03/2005

What's a minor thug to do? You're on the bottom rung of your criminal gang, overlooked and underpaid. Consequently, while on some shady activity at the, erm, zoo, you don't feel bad about sneaking off for a look at the piranha fish.You're just admiring the flesh-eating beasts when, suddenly, a psycho in a big trenchcoat grabs you, mutters something about "information" and then, without waiting even a microsecond for a response, plunges your head into the water and stands impassively as the ...