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Review: Twin Blades (Xbox 360)

Words by

Steven Wright

Posted on January 14, 2010

Press Start Studios have definitely made a splash with Twin Blades, their debut game available on Xbox LIVE and iTunes. You play as a zombie killing nun. That sentence alone sold the game to me. Just read it one more time – a nun, that kills zombies. Brilliant.

The most striking element of Twin Blades is the graphics. For an indie game Press Start Studios have made it look very polished, even more so than some full price arcade games. I’m not a huge fan of manga but it works really well with the games style. The zombies are similar to the style of PopCap’s Plants Vs. Zombies with bright colours and cartoon violence, that is until you swing at them with your scythe and they explode in variety of pleasing ways. As you work your way through the levels you can expect to see zombies armoured up with a variation of kitchen appliances, Hawaiian clothing, and even the odd skeleton thrown in to make up the numbers.

The game does lack a story as you work your way through 31 days of a zombie apocalypse – I only lasted 11 days without dying. You move across the screen from left to right in standard side scrolling fashion killing everything in your way. Each level consists of the market, graveyard, church, and the edge of the town – all lovingly designed to match the games manga style. The game-play offers up enough variety to keep you interested though.

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Review: Kaotik Puzzle (Xbox 360)

Words by

Derek McEwan

Posted on January 14, 2010

This is what could only be called a cloned hybrid of Zookeeper for the DS and one of the many Tetris style puzzle games out there.

This strangely addictive game by Silvermax is one of those games that you could find yourself playing for hours on end, but the same could be said for many games of this kind. It is annoying to the point of maddening, but still strangely addictive. The music as always when it comes to Indie games is fun for about 5 minutes but you will soon be muting your television in order to stop the inevitable brain melt that is bound to happen.

The concept is simple enough, you have a screen which is quarter filled with various coloured blocks and you have to link said blocks together in groups of three or more to make them vanish in a tiny explosion. What makes this game different is that blocks don’t fall from the top of the screen to hamper your progress. The blocks push up at a horribly slow rate which adds to the slow pace of the game in general. However don’t be fooled, because you can soon lose your concentration, especially in the harder difficulties and find yourself with a screen full of blocks while your opponent slowly edges closer and closer to victory.

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Review: Rainbow Islands: Towering Adventure! (Xbox 360)

Words by

Derek McEwan

Posted on January 5, 2010

Review: Rainbow Islands: Towering Adventure! (Xbox 360)

I waited with anticipation as this game downloaded onto my Xbox hard drive, and initially I was in a state of bliss. I remember Rainbow Islands from when I was but a little lad, it was a fun, imaginative adventure which was for all intents and purposes a sequel to Bubble Bobble but with rainbows to fire out instead of bubbles.

Now as you would probably guess, I was expecting more of the same and for all intents and purposes that’s what I got. The game was a graphically enhanced version of the original with one major difference, you have to climb your way up a huge tower filled with enemies. Now this in itself has been done a plethora of times before in a number of ways, but this game seemed to have done it right. I mean it starts off like a retro platformers dream come true until you see the tiny, well not really that tiny, flaws. As you progress through the game enjoying the upbeat pop track you may notice that the penalties for even so much as touching an enemy will knock 30 seconds from your allotted time. This can be rectified however by collecting crystals that are dropped by said enemies, however until you become more versed in the dynamics of the game you will find that you can only collect measly 1 second time bonuses that take you twice as long to collect, this kind of renders them pointless. You do get 5 and 10 second bonus crystals as you start to rack up multiplier kills, but if you set a foot wrong you will find it a wasted endevour as you get 30 seconds knocked from your time limit again and again.

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Review: 0D Beat Drop (Xbox 360)

Words by

Tom Battey

Posted on December 31, 2009

0D Beat Drop is a Columns-style block stacking game; struggling amidst a sea of Columns-style block stacking games now available in the Xbox LIVE Arcade marketplace. Can it stand out from the crowd, and, more importantly, is it entertaining enough to be worth 800 of your hard earned Microsoft Points? The answer, in the end, largely depends on how much you love Columns-style block stacking games.

Beat Drop’s gameplay will be largely familiar to pretty much anyone who’s familiar with Tetris, and who isn’t familiar with Tetris? Coloured blocks go down the screen, you stack them next to blocks of the matching colour, blocks go boom, you gain points. Stack the blocks too high, you lose. Beat Drop’s caveat is its use of music, specifically the rhythm of the backing music, as a defining feature of the gameplay. The graphics on screen pulse to the beat of the music (as does, quite irritatingly, your controller), and, if you hit a button in time to the beat, your blocks will slam down into the field, eliminating any matching blocks they connect with.

This feature works well, and adds a new level of pace and strategy to the otherwise quite vanilla gameplay; the beat drop system lets you set up strings of combos, and slamming your final block down onto a carefully constructed tower in time to a thumping tune is really quite rewarding. If your opponent lets you, of course.

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Review: Diner Dash (Xbox 360)

Words by

Jennifer Allen

Posted on December 30, 2009

The life of a waitress has always seemed rather unrewarding to me, even more so now that I’ve played Diner Dash and experienced true dining mayhem. Diner Dash is part of the time management genre, one that’s probably quite unfamiliar to many gamers. It’s particularly popular with the casual player thanks to its simple but addictive nature.

You play Flo, a waitress in a restaurant, unfortunately for her the only waitress at that. You must serve customers as quickly as they come in. It doesn’t take long to get into the swing of things: seat a customer, take their order, deliver their food, take their payment, clean the dishes, and so on and so on. Written down it might sound dull but it quickly becomes frantic yet compelling. The customers come in at increasing speed and in greater number meaning the player must plan ahead when it comes to seating arrangements. Suddenly you have to ensure you remember the different types of customer such as old customers being slow, while business people are ridiculously fast. Before you know it, things involve a hell of a lot of concentration. Sure it might not sound overly exciting to those who prefer more action packed affairs, but for the casual or novice gamer it certainly has something about it. It’s quickly obvious why Diner Dash has been so popular on the many other platforms it has previously featured on. It’s simple yet addictive, a perfect formula for success.

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