Picking up where Cooking Academy 2: World Cuisine left off, Cooking Academy 3: Recipe for Success sees our hero returning to their roots at the Cooking Academy after having won 1 million dollars in the Annual World Culinary Workshop. Your new goal is to create a cookbook filled with the best recipes the world has to offer, and you'll need the help of the academy's many skilled chefs to do just that. It's just unfortunate that the gameplay hasn't picked up much originality along the way.
There's a certain sense of nostalgia that gets tapped into whenever I load up a 2D sidescrolling exploration platformer, or as their known now a "Metroidvania" experience. Long mornings turned into evenings as I went over every little pixel with every tool in my arsenal, to discover every passage to get every treasure in games like Symphony of the Night and Super Metroid. Recent indie release A Valley Without Wind wants to tap into that while throwing in the proverbial kitchen sink for good measure, so stick with me for a bit.
Simply rolling out a real-time strategy game in a fantasy setting probably isn't going to cause much of a stir, because honestly, it's been done. Making said RTS free to play? That's worth a look, and thanks to Frogwares, it's a reality in the form of World of Battles: Morningstar.
Formula 1 racing management game. The chances are that those words mashed together aren't too exciting for the majority of Gamezebo readers, although if you've clicked through to this review, then perhaps you are indeed looking for a spot of high-speed simulation. Pole Position 2012 definitely has a lot of expertise under its bonnet, with specs and stats scattered all over the place.
It's a familiar scene: Scowling land magnate in bulldozer levels forest to build money-making something-or-other. Bright-eyed do-gooders step in, save planet. Such is the case in Campgrounds, in which a girl named Addie proves her tree-killing boss that you can still run a profitable campsite while staying on Mother Nature's good side. Well, smarty pants, if only it were that easy, as Addie and players find out in this challenging resource management game.
It's pretty much universally acknowledged that Telltale's Jurassic Park games were terrible. They were really nothing more than poorly implemented quicktime events. The story was ok, but slogging through the gameplay wasn't worth the story bits you got out of it. Suddenly all of the announced games in Telltale's line-up were called into question, and enthusiasm was tempered. Would they have time to avoid similar pitfalls and right the ship? Now we have an answer with The Walking Dead. That answer is.... mostly.
The original Monday Night Combat was a breakout Xbox Live Arcade hit that shouldn't have been one. In the crowded online multiplayer scene dominated by the likes of the Call of Duty, Halo and Gears of War franchises, a little independent title shouldn't be terribly successful - but time has proven it to be one of Xbox Live Arcade's biggest games. The blending of elements from Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, tower defense, and a whole lot of Defense of the Ancients hit the right chord for many people, myself included.
The upcoming movie Battleship appears to take space battles and put them in the water. Stellar Impact, available now on Steam, does the opposite: It turns multiplayer sci-fi skirmishes into something approximating naval combat thanks to the elimination of that pesky third dimension.