Where are all the cowboy games? Bald marines seeking crouch-level cover emerge from the shadowy, inexplicably-brown wastes of the industry’s finest on a weekly basis, whilst the sheer brutality and unique charisma of the western era has gone largely ignored. Thankfully, Rockstar have kicked down that paticular door recently with the fantastic Red Dead Redemption, so hopefully many more devs will step up and give us more adventures in this interesting setting!

Hopefully, they’ll be better than this game. Nope, I’m not reviewing Red Dead Redemption. Partly because I know what my final rating would be, and partly because it would torpedo my scholastic career for all eternity. No, this is a multiplayer-only indie outlaw-em-up, developed by newcomers FatShark. Well, okay, not “newcomers” exactly, but “GRIN 2: License Harder” isn’t as polite. They seem to be following the path of their precursors: One good 2D Bionic Commando game, followed by a bunch of crap and a swift bankruptcy. And unfortunately for them, there are no grappling hook arms in this game.

The premise is pretty familiar – two teams, with members selecting from a choice of brightly dressed unique-looking gunslingers with different talents and weapons, compete in various attack/defend game modes in a collection of desert-based landscapes. That sound you heard was either Valve rolling their eyes really hard, or the splashback from them diving into their Scrooge McDuck-style money pool. They can’t be feeling too threatened by this, though, since I played this through a free weekend on Steam. Which is good, cause it saved me money.

The primary problem with the game, surprisingly, is not in it’s derivative gameplay but in the netcode. I’m not sure what kind of bizarre, half-broken code GRI–… FatShark, sorry, uses to create a situation where a server hosted by a random bittorrenting idiot on a 56k connection gives me a better ping than every dedicated server running, but I’m pretty sure some kind of Invisible War-level fiasco was going on behind the scenes there. The fact that Dedicated Servers – a kind of vital part of any PC shooter worth it’s shaders – were haphazardly patched in well after launch further implies that something’s kind of gone horrifically wrong somewhere down the line. And the game’s initials being LaG… well, that’s just rubbing salt in the wound, really.

A multiplayer game that actively fights my attempts to play it with other people is something I can’t actively recommend. I give it one out of the four cowboy games that exist.

The Great Giana Sisters is a Super Mario Bros. ripoff. THERE I SAID IT. Course, this is not some startling new revelation: The original game came out in 1987, and lasted all of five minutes before Nintendo swarmed upon it like a pack of angry wildebeest. 20-something years later, the game returned in a new form on the DS and iPhone, somehow managing to avoid Nintendo’s wandering eye despite once again leaping into their kitchen, eating all their food, and probably pooping in the fireplace.

The storyline, as with all platform games, is of entirely no consequence, and frankly I can’t even remember it. You play Giana, as you run from one end of a level to the other, grabbing diamonds, throwing fireballs and stomping on not-Goombas. There’s clearly nothing groundbreaking about this, but it’s quite fun and has a decent amount of personality, with enemies shooting a glare at the camera as you jump over them and C64-style music setting the retro tone.

The thing that makes or breaks classic-style games on iOS devices is the controls, and Giana fares very well here – the lack of a run button means you can focus on precision jumping and shooting, and it’s honestly the most comfortable platforming control scheme I’ve felt on the device yet. This is a good thing, because the later levels were clearly made with the DS in mind, with lots of precision jumping and generally bastardly enemy placement, so every bit of dexterity allowed by the controls counts.

Not everything is great, though – the graphics, aside from Giana, are all poorly upsized from the DS version using a scaling filter, robbing them of some of their pixel-art beauty. Perhaps more crucially a problem, though, every boss is the fucking same. I don’t mean that in that you use the same trick on different bosses, I mean it’s the exact same boss, only slightly harder and needing an extra hit before he dies! Oh, and the room tileset is different. This might have been okay in 1987, but considering the polish on the rest of the game, it feels especially lazy, and marrs the experience.

Overall, the game is fantastically polished with the exception of a few grubby stains, diabolically hard in the later stages, and has a wonderful retro feeling. I give it six out of seven filter-resized sprites.

When it was announced that Bethesda, a studio with many years of experience in medieval fantasy RPGs, would be resurrecting the long dormant cult classic series Fallout, fanboys all over the internet swept into a violent fury that the series’ dead, long bankrupt creators would not be doing the job. The rage only increased upon the revelation that it would not be an isometric, turn based game running at 640×480 like the originals, but a high resolution 3D game like Oblivion. But while the accusations that Fallout 3 would just be a lazy pallete shift of Beth’s previous game increased, the studio had learned from past mistakes, and delivered a RPG tour de force that, while far from perfect, is still a great way to while away the hours.

The world of Fallout is not, in any way shape or form, a happy place. Set in an alternate history where the world never quite moved past the 1950s culture-wise and the Cold War came to a much less peaceful, much more apocalyptic ending, the game sees the player-created Lone Wanderer escaping from his Vault (a nuclear shelter where people have lived out their lives in a twisted form of pre-war normalcy for generations) into the irradiated ruins of Washington D.C. to try and find his/her father, and stumbling across a secret that could, for better or worse, change the Capitol Wasteland forever.

Pleasingly, the game lets you conduct business more or less as you please. You can be a polite do-gooder saving the hardy survivors from the many slavers, mutated beasts and monstrosities that the Wasteland throws up, or you can be a complete and total bastard that counts the aforementioned slavers as close personal friends. You can follow the plot, or ignore the gentle hand-holding and explore the wasteland as you wish. You can fight in real time like a FPS, or use the “VATS” system to pause the game and target individual body parts to attack in slow motion like the original turn-based games.

One particular favorite feature of mine is the Perks system, back from the original isometric games. As you gain experience and level up, you can select Perks, which let you customize and specialize your character in specific ways, from the useful (improving your accuracy when using specific weapon types) to the character-specific (Are you a mean bastard? Do you hang out with horrible people? Why not complete the set and take up Cannibalism?) to the amusing (The infamous and self-explanitory “Bloody Mess” perk makes a much-awaited return!).

The game, however, is far from perfect. Animations feel stiff and poorly done. The well-acted conversations are relayed by a character model staring blankly at a static camera. Combat can be stiff and clunky if you don’t rely on VATS, which while awesome makes the game much, much easier. Glitches abound, and the UI feels optimised for a console, leaving PC gamers feeling a little left out (it’s a world ahead of Oblivion’s awful interface, though!)

However, much of this can be forgiven, for when the pieces come together, they come together well, and hard – it’s hard not to supress a grin upon finding a horde of well-armed, well-embedded opponents and chunkifying them all by way of skill, ability and superior firepower, or upon escaping a sinister abandoned facility caked in monster bits and down to your last few bullets, but with what you were looking for tucked safely under your arm. At it’s high points, Fallout 3 reaches the same great heights as it’s predecessors in a much more accessible way.

Fallout 3 is a fantastic game, although I recommend the PC version for modding potential. I give it eight furious manchildren out of ten.

This game has gotten a decent amount of flak from the press and the fans – scores roughly average at 75 and the multiplayer has been widely panned – but there’s still a decent amount of enjoyment to be wrung out of the latest installment of The Only FPS Franchise That Can Stake An Accurate Claim To Possibly Being Older Than Prostitution.

The plot is the usual pulp-WW2 fun – unfortunately named American superspy BJ Blazkowicz is dropped into a German city to aid the local resistance to the Nazi occupation, and maybe stop a sinister occult plan by the Nazis to tap into an alternate dimension to acquire ultimate power if he has some spare time to kill. Sadly, Robo-Hitler once again fails to make an appearance, much to the dissapointment of everyone who’s been gaming since at least 1992.

Gameplay is fairly typical of the genre this series made popular – run from Point A to B while reducing increasingly ridiculous Nazi forces to kibble on the way – except between missions Points A and B are in a non-linear city. This is kinda cool at first, but quickly gets annoying when you just want to advance the paper-thin plot or upgrade your weapons without having to stop every couple of blocks to take out a small legion of angry germans and their friendly robot-dude-with-glowing-weak-points.

One feature that lowers the monotony is the Thule Medallion, an item you get very early on that enables you to briefly step into the Void (an alternate universe that looks exactly like ours, except everything is green and weak points glow) and activate special powers that you earn over the course of the game, like Bullet Time or temporary invulnerability. This helps both in overcoming difficult obstacles and finding new and interesting ways to kibble-ise brownshirts. And damned if kibble-ising brownshirts isn’t fun! There’s enough variety put into the gore effects and death animations that fights are exactly as fun as wanton Nazi slaughter should be.

As for multiplayer, I would tell you about it, but it appears that literally nobody was playing it when I checked. Which is always a good sign.

Overall, the game is fun but repetitive as hell, an average shooter slightly raised by slight signs of true quality that are ultimately quashed by the design-by-committee-ness of it all. I give it three out of five novelty difficulty levels.

Well, it’s Halo. Sure you play as (several) different protagonists, and Bungie remembered to turn fall damage on for the first time in 8 years, and there’s an element of exploration between missions, but it’s still Halo, and you’re still fighting the exact same enemies with the exact same weapons. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is entirely up to you.

There is also an additional multiplayer game mode called Firefight, which is a generic “fend off waves of enemies” mode with a random difficulty-increasing modification each wave. I haven’t had a chance to properly try this mode admittedly, but it doesn’t really seem to do much different from other, similar modes in other games.

The game also comes with a special version of Halo 3 with no single player mode and all the additional multiplayer content, plus some extra maps. This is actually a pretty cool trick to bring more players into Halo multiplayer, and I’m sure the six people who didn’t already own Halo 3 appreciate it greatly.

So while the game brings nothing new to the table at all whatsoever, it’s still a decently enjoyable bout of FPS action and doesn’t really taint the series by way of it’s existence. As a result, I give it 3 embarassing spinoffs out of 5.