Review: Rooms: The Main Building (DS)

Review: Rooms: The Main Building (DS)

Rooms: The Main Building is about as exciting as the name suggests. It’s a game full of sliding puzzles. You know those little puzzles you’ve mostly played on a Christmas day after one drops out of your cracker when all you really wanted was a bouncy ball? Yup, those puzzles. If you’ve spent any time playing said puzzles, you’ll realise that it’s quite good fun for five minutes then utterly repetitive afterwards. Rooms: The Main Building epitomises this perfectly.

There is a semblance of a story going on here. You are Mr X and you’ve been transported to a strange mansion. Your mission is to figure out what’s going on and solve over 100 sliding puzzles along the way. There’s no real need for the story admittedly as you’ll find yourself forgetting about it all too quickly.

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Hands-On: Vanquish (Xbox 360)

Hands-On: Vanquish (Xbox 360)

It’s hard not to get jittery and amped up after spending time with Platinum Games’ Vanquish. Since their success with Bayonetta, which gave the action genre a brutal kick up the rectum it deservedly needed, Platinum return to give 3rd person shooters the same treatment.

The demo puts players in control of Sam Gideon, a hard talking, bad-ass DARPA agent in control of an experimental ARS (Augmented Reaction Suit) combat suit capable of hyper-mobility in extreme situations. The demo is set in a landing bay of the Providence Space Colony, which has been overrun with Russian combat robots, culminating in a huge boss battle.

Vanquish takes the concept of cover combat and undermines the horrible co-dependent relationship most gamers have with waist high defence. The boost function allows for a high level of manoeuvrability, which kicks the pace up several notches. With this in mind, speed is key to surviving the flurry of bullets and rockets that are hurled your way, assaulting the eyes like a deadly fireworks display.

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Review: Madden NFL 11 (Xbox 360)

Review: Madden NFL 11 (Xbox 360)

As September falls so do the sports games from EA; Golf, Football, Soccer, Ice Hockey, College Football, Crown Green Bowling, the list goes on. If you don’t own the last one, or maybe the last 17, then why would you pick this up? Especially if you don’t understand the sport, and who can blame you with American Football, it’s a confusing beast, to say the least.

The first Madden game I picked up was Madden 04. With a very limited understanding of the sport, I persevered and slowly learned the basics. Only now, some six or seven years and 4 bought games later, I think of myself as half-decent. At best.

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