Games

Away from the multiplayer arena, fans of first-person shooters have had a pretty tough time of it recently. The short-lived campaign modes served up by high profile releases like Call of Duty: Black Ops and Homefront have failed to live up to expectations and felt more like developers going through the motions rather than pushing the genre in either exciting or interesting new directions. Thanks heavens then for games developer Crytek, which has delivered the shot-in-the-arm this withering genre so desperately needed with its latest offering Crysis 2.

Ever since Nintendo first unleashed The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on the N64 in 1998, other publishers have struggled to match up to that epic action-adventure game. And while Darksiders II doesn't quite achieve that lofty goal, it's still a blast to play.

There appear to be two basic points of view when it comes to making a sequel to a popular videogame. The first is to use it as an opportunity to address the strengths and weaknesses of the original game in order to build on its success and provide gamers with an even richer and more engrossing experience. The second is to use it as an excuse to simply give gamers more of the same. Take a peek at the rating at the bottom of this review and see if you can guess which of these two approaches Polish developer Techland has taken with Dead Island: Riptide…

Released in late 2008, the original Dead Space was a chilling reminder of how terrifying the survival horror genre could be in the right hands. Easily on a par with the most spooky entries in the Resident Evil and Silent Hill series, Dead Space gave gamers something to be frightened of. But, like any good horror film, sequels were inevitable, and over the course of two more games and two animated movies, the Dead Space franchise has transformed like one of its monstrous Necromorphs to the point where it only occasionally resembles its original form.

Dystopian, Blade Runner-esque futures are ten-a-penny in videogames. So it's hard not to feel a little jaded when yet another title turns up promising to take you into a perpetually overcast near-future version of our world, populated by sinister big-business types and shadowy conspiracies. But it's worth remembering that the original Deus Ex set the benchmark for the action-role-playing-game genre when it hit the PC at the turn of the Millennium. And, remarkably, this third entry in the series manages to match, if not top that lofty achievement.

Dunwall is a city ridden with corruption. While its debauched upper classes scheme and plot against one another, its downtrodden citizens are afflicted by a terrible plague that has turned some into crazed savages and left whole areas boarded up and deserted.