Tag Archives: Review

Review: Metro 2033 (PC)

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The radioactive winterland of Earth as seen through an old gasmask in Metro 2033

I think there is something to be said when a game can take something that would be ominous and foreboding normally and instead makes it feel welcoming and safe. I wouldn’t have thought that dark, lonely Russian subway tunnels could ever feel like home, but 4A’s Metro 2033 proved me wrong. While I haven’t read the book that the game is based on (but the English translation is coming out soon and I have it preordered), it’s clear that the author Dmitry A. Glukhovsky had some interesting commentary on Russia’s history and flirtations with communism. That these ideas were carried over into the Metro 2033 game so well is something that I can’t remember seeing in any other release and puts some real weight behind the game-play (BioShock doesn’t count; it criticized a philosophy itself and wasn’t based on a book that disparaged objectivism).

Paranoia, eh Komrade?


While playing Metro 2033 I couldn’t help but compare it to Mark Twain’s novel Huck Finn. Racial themes aside, the rail system in Metro 2033 serves exactly the same purpose that the Mississippi river fulfills in Finn, in that it leads the protagonist to varied situations and characters that provide insightful commentary about our real world. Like the Mississippi, the metro system is wondrous and hazardous, but manageable when respected, and the further that the player moves away from the rails the worse and more dire the presented situations become. While the metro environment can be dangerous, the people on and around the system prove to be much more so, to the point that the confined, claustrophobic tunnels feel much safer than the husk of Moscow which can only be explored from the safety of a tight-fitting gas mask. Continue reading →

Review: Monday Night Combat (PC)

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Monday Night Combat (MNC), by Uber Entertainment, is the smartest competitive multiplayer game to come out in recent years, and I love it. In a nutshell, it’s a class-based, third-person shooter combined with elements of tower defense, with the ultimate goal being to destroy the other team’s moneyball, which can only be made vulnerable initially by AI bots. Leveling up increases skill potency and passive class stats like health, and is managed with currency earned by destroying AI bots, taking out other players, or picking it up as drops. Heck, even doing fully animated and non-offensive taunts instead of the time-old and immature tradition of teabagging your foes pays off. Each class has a purpose and utility, and each skill has valid uses and situations in the game that they were designed for. If you don’t want to invest in your skills for the match, you can bolster base defenses by purchasing and upgrading turrets, buy a wave of class-specific bots to assault the opposing base, or spend your money activating environmental hazards to harm enemy players or destroy bots on the map. There is always something productive to do other than out-twitching or out-headshotting the folks on the other team.

In any other game, the team that had all positive kill/death ratios would have won. Instead, we lost.


One team can be dominating in terms of kills, but they’re oftentimes doing so at the cost of maintaining map control and escorting their own bots to the enemy base and opening it up to be attacked; it’s not uncommon for a team doing this to ultimately lose despite employing a strategy that would bring them victory in almost any other competitive game. An assassin can be obsessed with chasing backstabs, and they might be really good at it (which is unlikely), but they’d be much more effective sneaking around and creating openings for their team to exploit, or wiping all the enemy bots off the map with the environmental Annihilator attack. Conversely, a support player can deploy their turret near the Annihilator to keep enemies away, while periodically dropping air strike attacks on the activation switch to deny it to the other team until a teammate with the spare cash can activate it.
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Review: Ghost Trick (DS)

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Ghost Trick is the Inception of videogames; it creates a concept of hopping from objects and going back in time for a few minutes and then bases the whole of the game and everything the player does around these simple concepts, while exploring them from multiple, sensible angles to keep things fresh and fun. The mastery of how the system developed for Ghost Trick works, and coupled with an engaging mystery that raises more questions as the game progresses makes Ghost Trick a fun experience that feels just right in terms of difficulty, if not a tad too short.

Compared to the previously developed Phoenix Wright series, Ghost Trick makes several necessary improvements to the adventure game formula. The biggest structural change is that the player is actively participating in events instead of trying to recreate them from evidence and witness testimony. Playing as a ghost detective and saving somebody’s life by modifying a sequence of events is much more satisfying than merely bringing their killer to justice. Additionally, there’s no “life bar” that punishes the player for experimenting differently than the game designers intended or freely guessing. Instead, failure is often times a learning experience and restarting a sequence is simple, painless, and built into the system of the game itself.

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