Developers know you're only as good as your last game, and unfortunately for Maximize Games, their last game was the ill-conceived Silent Scream: The Dancer. Before making that buggy, confusing, chock-full of bad dialog hidden object game, the company made a great little time-management/romance game in 2010 called 2 Tasty. Thank goodness, Maximize seems to have realized the error of its ways and gone back to what it does well; the result is a fun little sequel to 2 Tasty called 2 Tasty Too: L'Amour a Paris.
The Vansig family just can't stop being evil, and they've come back for yet another round of dastardly shenanigans in Nightfall Mysteries: Black Heart, the third tale of the clan of no-goodniks and the helpless cheese-eaters who rely on you to put a stop to it. But despite the promise of simmering malevolence it's actually a rather dull affair: a flat, faux-creepy adventure that achieves mediocrity and nothing more.
Racing games can be a great deal of fun namely because their recipe is often simple: quality controls, fast-pacing, fun tracks, and maybe a unique gimmick or two. Gameloft's Google+ titleGT Racing Motor Academy fails on all of these fronts. Giving players virtually nothing to sate their racing appetite and taking the free-to-play model a bit too far, the grinding nature of the game wears thin quickly. Coupled with awful controls, horrendous sound design, minimal style, and zero real challenge, it feels like a slapped together title made only for a quick buck.
Developer Realore's claims that All My Gods is "a casual game like no other" are pretty much the biggest lie ever. There are dozens of other titles like this out there. It's by no means a bad game, but there a number of quirks that bog the experience down and may make you want to think twice about purchasing it.
When I was a kid I grew up playing on a Tandy 1000 home computer. It wasn't much to look at, my display had a limited color palette, and there wasn't really anything beyond Space Quest II or Wheel of Fortune that it could run. But it was mine, and I loved it. Then I walked into Radio Shack one day and saw X-Wing running on a floor model. After this, I quickly learned the meaning of the word "upgrade."
I typically don't concern myself much with browser-based free to play MMO's. Right or wrong, I just don't expect much from them. So even when the basis of the game is something I absolutely adore (like Battlestar Galatica), I tend to just gloss over it and move on. Well, luckily after all this time I went back for an actual look. As it turns out, my expectations about these games was WAY off.
January might be an unusual month to release a Halloween-themed time management game, but Alawar did just that with Spooky Mall. Young Alice has to repay her student's loan, so she does not even hesitate to take a job offer which requires her to work at midnight at a very interesting mall. The concept of the game certainly sounds good, but I can already tell you that a lot of players might be in for a disappointment.
There's been a lot of discussion recently in the mobile game space about the morality of "inspired by" design versus "straight-up theft". With the ridiculously high speed that the mobile game space seems to move at, it's definitely become something where everyone has valid opinions on almost every side of the issue. Meanwhile, us PC gamers that have been at this for a while are just sitting back and laughing, all the while pointing out that Blizzard's Diablo series knows a thing or two about having inspired more than a few games, as well as being the victim of theft. Prolific free-to-play game developer BigPoint is throwing their browser-based hat into the ring with their very...ahem...Diablo-esque MMO Drakensang Online, currently in open beta. We've spent a decent chunk of time with the game and are here to tell you whether or not you should strengthen up your clicking finger.