I have mixed feelings about expansion packs for video games in general. For me, they always seem to fall into one of two categories: an overpriced handful of minor improvements, or a major change that screws up a part of a game I really liked. When I first began playing Falling Enchantress: Legendary Heroes, I had fears that it would be both. After several playthroughs, I’ve determined that while this expansion does feature a lot of minor improvements and some major changes that alter some of my favorite parts of the game, taken as a whole this standalone expansion is a worthy strategy title in its own right, and well worth your time.
Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds is a spinoff of Phantom Breaker, and although the original game was scheduled for a release in North America, it was canceled for unspecified reasons. This spinoff is a retro style side-scrolling beat ‘em up game, very similar to Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.
Over the past two years, I’ve had a plethora of headsets come across my desk. I’ve reviewed sets from a lot of the big name peripheral manufacturers, but Turtle Beach always seemed to elude me. At PAX East, I made it a point to stop by the Turtle Beach booth and speak with their PR team just to make sure I got a chance to see their new line of products. Shortly after PAX East, the Turtle Beach PX51 arrived at my house and I’ve never been quite as excited to check out a headset as I was this one. You see, Turtle Beach came out of nowhere and took the gaming world by force, quickly grabbing millions of fans as being the “go-to” headset for Call of Duty and other shooter fans alike. Now that I’ve spent some time with the Turtle Beach PX51, are they really the paramount device of the headphone upper echelon?
With the recent rise in popularity of E-Sports, gamers all over the world are familiar with Starcraft even if they have never played it themselves. Ask anyone who follows E-Sports in the US about Starcraft, and you’ll probably hear something about Koreans because that’s typically the gist of Starcraft to anyone who doesn’t play it. With Starcraft II receiving an expansion called Heart of the Swarm, I decided to dust off my backlog and finally put my hands on Starcraft. Was it worth delving into just for Heart of the Swarm?
I’ve always had a special place in my heart for twitch-based shooters. My first experiences with shooters came from the days of Quake, Doom, and Duke Nukem 3D, but it wasn’t until Quake 2′s online play that I really started to appreciate the online shooter for what it could be: A veritable madhouse of chaos. By the time Quake 3 Arena rolled around, I was in love with the fast action shooter genre; which was dubbed “twitch”, due to the extremely fast paced nature of the gameplay. Shootmania Storm returns us to the days of Q3A and Unreal Tournament, by re-introducing the twitch based shooter for a new generation of gamers on an engine (same engine used by Trackmania) that’s already proven itself in the competitive arena. Can Shootmania Storm de-throne currently superstar shooters like Call of Duty?