Syndicate Review

For a game set in the future, EA's rebooted Syndicate is a game very much trapped by the past.

At an instinctive level, that's because it's an all-action first-person shooter reboot of a 1993 game that was all about top-down strategy. At times you can feel the game creaking as it tries to keep one foot in a world created almost 20 years ago and the other in the modern shooter space. But Syndicate is also a game hemmed in by the standards of the FPS genre, which are themselves showing considerable strain after years of overuse. With such ambitious exercises as Chronicles of Riddick and The Darkness to its credit, Swedish studio Starbreeze would seem to be the perfect choice to inject some mutant DNA into the genre, but Syndicate is sadly the developer's most anonymous and generic work thus far.

Part of the problem is that, in accordance with accepted FPS thinking, the game has been cleaved down the middle and separated into single- and multiplayer chunks. It's a decision that leaves the former feeling predictable and perfunctory and the latter (a co-op campaign) frustratingly underdeveloped. Had the two been combined with the flair that Starbreeze has exhibited in the past, Syndicate could have been quite special. As it is, it's dependable enough, but hardly interesting.

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Reality Fighters Review

I've been showing off PlayStation Vita to my family. Dad likes a bit of Xbox, mum is conducting another affair with Professor Layton, and my 10-year-old niece is an evolutionary miracle: half-human, half-iOS.

As such, I'm always keen to gauge their reactions to any notable breakthrough in gaming, away from the stage-managed, on-message, cut-and-paste hype of The Industry.

Beaming with 'look at me' novelty, Reality Fighters seemed a good place to start. And it duly produced "ooh"s and "aah"s in all the right places as I swiftly transformed mother into a ballet-dancing kung fu master and had her striking wildly at her Santa coat-and-skirt-wearing son in my parents' kitchen sink. It puts a new spin on child abuse, if nothing else.

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App of the Day: Hank Hazard

If the App Store was a real shop, it'd be a spacious, attractive, well-lit and welcoming place with some slightly dubious promotional offers and sales on the majority of new releases.

You'd find it well-stocked with endless runners and asynchronous multiplayer games, a little lighter on music titles and strategy games, while the platformers would sport a 'fragile' sticker, the owners acknowledging that errant prods are likely to cause consumer frustration.

Then you'd wander into the aisle marked 'physics puzzlers' and find yourself unable to move, the heaving shelves coughing their contents onto the floor as assistants attempt to stack up more fresh product.

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Alan Wake's American Nightmare Review

After five years in development, it was hardly a surprise that every brow associated with Alan Wake was furrowed into an irretrievable state of seriousface. And when it did at last arrive, that was the game's problem: it looked great, had a nicely creepy atmosphere, the action mechanics were solid; but, goodness, it didn't half take itself seriously.

This was most potently symbolised by Wake himself, a dreary, po-faced bore (yes, it takes a writer to know one), forever framing the world around him in self-absorbed cliché. For a game with blockbuster literary aspirations, it's a bit of a problem when it delivers a straight-to-DVD script.

The character now returns, not in another fussily self-conscious epic, but as an Xbox Live Arcade title knocked out for fun on the side - and what a difference that has made.

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Gravity Daze Review

Editor's note: This is an import review of the Japanese edition of Gravity Daze, available now. The game will be titled Gravity Rush when it appears in North America and Europe, but no release date has been set for this version.

About two thirds of the way through Gravity Daze, the designers throw in one of the most entertaining mission objectives I've been given in a while: plummet. That's what it amounted to, anyway. Regardless of the exact wording, I was invited to spend the next 15 minutes falling through a magical Dickensian city perched in the sky, past gantries, tangles of piping and shimmering brickwork, and then deeper into honeycombed caverns filled with weird, fungal architecture.

Sure, there were enemies to fight along the way and glittering chains of collectables to race between - for a while, I was even joined by a sexy lady with some silly pants who really wanted to kill me - but the sequence didn't actually need any of that. I was happy just to follow the calm procession of waypoints, falling deeper and deeper through this strange world until a genuine sense of loneliness set in.

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App of the Day: Super Quickhook

When I were a lad all the best games had Super in the title. So even before Super Quickhook's retro sprites and chiptunes have worked their simple charms, there's something nostalgic to it. But the aesthetics are as far as it goes.

Super Quickhook looks like a classic from yesteryear, but it's a modern thoroughbred of the one-touch school. Its long and diverse missions, as well as two superb endless modes, are structured around doing one thing really well - swinging on a hook. Don't all rush at once.

For Super Quickhook, this single skill is refined and built around with real focus, and more than a little imagination. Tapping in the upper right of the screen shoots out your grappling hook, diagonally upwards in the direction the character's facing. When the hook catches, the character holds on to the rope for as long as your finger's still on the screen. So: release to jump.

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App of the Day: Beat Sneak Bandit

We've had points, ribbons, stars, and these days there's nothing quite like a sweet hat to reward someone's progress, but little else excites my senses like a good jingle. Think back on all those hidden rooms you've found in Zelda games - you probably enjoyed what you found inside, but I really hope you smiled the first time you heard the fanfare, because otherwise we can't be friends.

So if Beat Sneak Bandit is remembered for one thing, let it be its glorious reward sound. Every time you finish a level and the summary screen appears, Simigo's rhythmic platform puzzler wiggles its funky hips for a handful of beats before ending on a synth stab, and if it's possible to avoid joining in by bouncing your head from side to side then I haven't discovered how, which is a shame because I already look silly enough on public transport without dancing in my seat.

It's the sort of detail that can leave a decent game lodged in the memory, but Beat Sneak Bandit is much more than that. It's a classic game of single-screen obstacle courses, each set over four stories of a maniac's mansion, where the goal is to gather up clocks without being caught, but there's an inspired twist: you can only move in time to the beat of each level's infectious soundtrack.

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App of the Day: Call Connect

As a personal thing - and I'll admit up front that there are plenty of exceptions - I tend not to be too bothered by most of the stories that games tell. Who am I jumping on, and where do I have to go next? Those are the kind of narrative concerns created by the platformers I grew up loving, and while the odd smartly-written RPG or shooter has worked its way through my defences since then, that simple setup is almost always enough for me.

Context, however, is crucial. Context can make a good game great or a poor game worse. On the App Store, with its split-second purchasing decisions and make-or-break icons - never buy an app with a lousy icon - it's more important than ever, and no recent game has driven this home to me quite as clearly as Call Connect.

Call Connect is a colour-matching puzzler, which would be entirely acceptable by itself, I guess. Happily, it dresses its colour-matching up a little and turns you into a switchboard operator at a phone company. That's the power of context.

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Jagged Alliance: Back in Action Review

Up until very recently, if you'd told someone who was a PC gamer in the mid-nineties that 2012 would see remakes of both X-COM and Jagged Alliance, they'd have laughed at you. Before turning misty-eyed and staring into the middle distance while alternately mournfully singing Oh Danny Boy and muttering something about time units, probably.

Here we are, though. Firaxis' new version of the incomparable X-COM is due later this year, and last week saw the release of Back In Action, a remake of 1999's turn-based strategy game Jagged Alliance 2 and the first new, official game in the series since then.

There have been expansion packs, there have been multiple abortive attempts to make Jagged Alliance 3, there has been an unofficial sequel (Hired Guns, The Jagged Edge) and there have been oh-so-many mods. Back in Action, though, is a re-imagining of the second game's tale of hired mercenaries liberating a fictional country from its despotic queen. You play the essentially unseen commander of these mercs: telling 'em where to go, who to shoot, what to shoot them with, what gear to buy and, when you can afford it, hiring new contract killers to join their ranks or replace those whose messy deaths have been the result of your poor planning.

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Tekken 3D: Prime Edition

Although SNK vs. Capcom on the Neo Geo Pocket and Street Fighter Alpha 3 on the Game Boy Advance proved that portable punch-ups weren't just the fever dream of a studio gone mental, it wasn't until Tekken: Dark Resurrection that handheld fighting games finally matched the ambition of their console brethren. Of course, this was partly down to the processing power of the PSP and its workable analogue slider - but not to sell Katsuhiro Harada and his team short, the game also benefited from the engaging Tekken Dojo mode and a wealth of character customisation options.

In comparison, Tekken 3D: Prime Edition for 3DS is a bare-bones port that's less about single-player content - something which every portable fighting game needs in spades - and more about pimping the Tekken 6 system out to a Nintendo audience. This is a shame, as after the success of Dark Resurrection and the equally accomplished SoulCalibur: Broken Destiny, Namco has become synonymous with full-featured fighting games that lose little in the handheld transition. But comparing Tekken 3D to last year's Dead or Alive: Dimensions, it's clear that Team Ninja offers more for the backpacking brawler.

The good news, however, is that Tekken 3D features all 40 characters from Tekken 6 in a mammoth roster that includes old staples like the katana-abusing Yoshimitsu with his kangaroo kicks and the leopard-loving King with his chainable throws, as well as more recent additions like gypsy assassin Zafina with her spidery stances and the gut-barging Bob with his surprisingly dexterous footwork. It also seems that the Mishima Zaibatsu have been making advances in stem cell research, as Heihachi looks a tad younger than he did during the first King of Iron Fist Tournament.

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App of the Day: Reckless Racing 2

The drivers' portraits in Reckless Racing 2 tell a sad tale. These drooling bumpkins and greasy villains are a dash of the redneck personality that themed the original, but in Reckless Racing 2 they're kept on the sidelines. The country tunes get a trendy remix, the ramshackle jeeps and jalopies of the original are now sleek sports cars, and what on earth's happened to the drifting?

The drifting is changed significantly from Reckless Racing, initially at least, and this affects everything. Where the original was all wild slides and pile-ups, this is much more about racing lines, cornering and tight, controlled slides.

Overall it's less rambunctious, but elements of the handling remain exaggerated - slightly overturn at a corner, for example, and the car swings suddenly in that direction. Upgrading is another new feature and also where Reckless Racing 2 begins to convince, allowing you to customise a car's style between all-out speed, balanced and drifting. If you plump for the latter, the crazy long slides suddenly start appearing again.

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The Jak and Daxter Trilogy Review

In many ways, the Jak and Daxter series serves as a chronicle of the declining platformer. Naughty Dog's PlayStation 2 trilogy starts off with an innocent collect-a-thon about a boy and his furry friend saving the world, but quickly shifts to a darker tone with an industrial setting, plenty of gunplay and an over-world that shows a much stronger likeness to Grand Theft Auto than the Precursor Legacy. The grim, later Jak games relegated most of their platforming to isolated tombs, ruins and ancient temples, signifying the genre becoming something of a relic.

As far as this HD upgrade for PS3 goes, it's a solid conversion with virtually no new content aside from trophies and 3D support. For the most part, developer Mass Media Inc's reverence for Naughty Dog's originals works, but it would have been nice for them to add an option for subtitles in the first Jak and Daxter, or implement separate controls for first- and third-person aiming, as what's inverted in one perspective won't be in another. Regardless of the lack of bells and whistles, remastering these games in 720p is still a significant visual upgrade of three of the most interesting platformers of the 21st century.

Of all the games in this collection, Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy shows its age the most - not just in terms of visuals (though its blocky character models do that), but in its design. This humble origin story hails from the days when platforming protagonists were expected to collect doodads and little else. They certainly didn't talk, and Jak instead expresses himself through dance, as was customary for the time.

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App of the Day: Paper Monsters

If Art Attack's Neil Buchanan ever made a platform game, it might look something like Paper Monsters: a simple side-scrolling affair set in a bright, homemade world.

The jovial star of Paper Monsters is a nameless but constantly smiling cardboard box who merrily trundles along on tiny cut-out legs. He's a friendly little guy would probably rip off an arm if you needed somewhere to write down a shopping list.

You command his movements via a virtual control stick for your left thumb and a jump button for your right, which are wisely kept hidden by default to avoid mussing up the graphics.

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Everybody's Golf Vita Review

As predictable as a new Ridge Racer, an iteration of Everybody's Golf accompanies the launch of new Sony hardware with solid dependability. Not that 'iteration' is really the right term here. Even Sony and developer Clap Hanz acknowledge the lack of innovation with this new release in the series by not bothering to add anything to the vanilla title.

Neither has the core of the game been touched in its move to touch-screen. Those Vita-exclusive features that do make an appearance - including a humorous option to pick up and move your golfer for tee-off by pinching the front and back screens as their legs flail in your grip - are gimmicky and thin.

You can poke at the few animals that stick their heads up before scarpering into the undergrowth, swipe at the screen to create a gust of wind and select the odd menu option with a tap. The only meaningful new interaction allows you to gain extra yards on tee-off if you quickly tilt the Vita backwards at point of impact (incredibly difficult to pull off) - but otherwise the designers have found little inspiration in meeting the idiosyncrasies of Sony's new hardware.

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Warp Review

Warp starts with one simple idea and everything cascades organically from there. The idea is summed up by the title: you can warp. This short-range teleport move allows you to spring Zero, an imprisoned alien, from his captivity in an underwater research base. Bypassing walls and doors, it never demands the same radical change in thinking as a Portal gun, but it tugs at the same thread. Traditional navigation must be abandoned as you learn to read the map in a different way.

Zero is a strange sort of hero, a cross between X-Men's Nightcrawler and a jelly baby, speaking only in Mogwai chirps. Don't be fooled by his adorable appearance, however. As well as warping through walls, he can jump into solid objects - including humans. Once inside, jiggling the left stick makes the object explode. Again, including humans. It makes for a tonally jarring experience; the cute, gelatinous critter who turns people into grisly splats of blood and meat.

As you explore the base, guided by another alien entity via psychic messages, you gain additional powers. The first allows you to create a phantom echo, useful for distracting guards and security turrets, but with limited range. The second allows you to swap places with any object the echo touches. The third lets you launch whatever object you've warped into as a projectile. In true Metroidvania style, the more abilities you gain, the more of the map you can access.

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App of the Day: Tongue Tied!

Dogs in games tend to come in two varieties. There are the adorably cute ones: loveable, enthusiastic pups who like nothing better than to be stroked, bathed or decked out in Mario-themed headwear. And then there are the heroic ones, the loyal companions who'll dig up treasures and bravely tug at the trousers of villains in battle.

So it's refreshing to play a game which reminds you of the universal truth that dogs are actually terrifically stupid. The stars of the show here are Max and Ralph, who've managed to get their tongues knotted together. Meanwhile your omnipotent finger must tap, slide and swipe to keep them out of trouble as they dumbly blunder onwards, wide grins spread across their slobbering jaws.

With standard virtual d-pad controls, the platforming would be a doddle, but developer Mojo Bones has opted for a control scheme to convey the awkwardness of controlling two doltish canines at once. As they gambol along automatically, you'll need to pull back on one of the dogs to catapult the pair over gaps and hazards. Alternatively, you can drag one underneath a platform to collect the bone tokens below, or tap both dogs to drop down from a higher level. Swing a dangling dog in an arc, and you can earn a score bonus for collecting eight or more tokens in a single swipe. There's a pleasing sense of elasticity and weight as you ping them about the place, particularly when you're swinging from tyres or working your way along a patch of sticky mud in a manner oddly akin to negotiating monkey bars.

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UFC Undisputed 3 Review

This year's Ultimate Fighting Championship is off to an excellent start - and a controversial one. UFC 143 delivered one of the most hotly debated fights of recent times.

With current UFC Welterweight Champion Georges St-Pierre still out of action with a knee injury, it was left down to former Strikeforce Champion Nick Diaz and former WEC Champion Carlos Condit to duke it out for the Interim Title. Diaz was the hot favourite to win, coming off an 11-win streak with his world-class boxing. But by playing an outside striking game and evading whenever his back was pressed against the cage, Condit secured a Unanimous Decision that prompted MMA forums across the globe to explode with polarised opinions.

This was a match that, while unworthy of a Fight of the Night accolade, perfectly demonstrated the importance of knowing your opponent's strengths and weaknesses while formulating an effective strategy based on your own skills. It's also something which the UFC Undisputed game series has worked hard to replicate, with a comprehensive fighting system that maintains the MMA mantra of dictating the pace and imposing your will. And in terms of striking a balance between challenge, accessibility and fun, Undisputed 3 is Yuke's most well rounded fighter to date.

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App of the Day: Candy Train

Candy Train looks so much like a PopCap game that it's practically a parody. The title screen is filled with bright colours and shiny, boiled-sweet textures, the sound track is cartoonishly adorable with its busy chuff-chuff-chuffing and its uncommonly cheery rail whistles.

Even the icon you'll see on your iPhone looks like the kind of thing Willy Wonka might hand out to tranquilise problematic visitors before an Oompa Loompa drops them off in a back alley somewhere. It's PopCap Concentrate, PopCap Imax, and that means it's all the weirder when you actually sit down to play Candy Train, and realise it was designed and built by utter bastards.

Tellingly, the game belongs to PopCap's 4th Battery brand - a label that was formed to release oddities like the brilliantly nasty Unpleasant Horse. Candy Train actually predates its iOS version, however. After its initial debut on the PopCap website back in 2001, it languished, too hard, too punishing for the Bejeweled crowd, until it turned up on the App Store for free in the middle of last year. I've been playing it ever since, and making practically no headway.

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Dear Esther Review

An argument has been raging among the judging panel of the Independent Games Festival. The flashpoint: whether the moody mystery narrative of Dear Esther constitutes a game at all.

What, no high-score table? Where are the guns? Dialogue trees? How do I level up? Surely there's some sort of keycard puzzle? In fact, no. There isn't even a button for interaction. You can't run or jump. You move through the environment - a wind-blasted Hebridean island - simply observing and absorbing. The only puzzle is the obscure, lyrical narrative itself.

Formerly a Half-Life 2 mod by university lecturer Dr Dan Pinchbeck, and now given an extremely fancy refab at the hands of Mirror's Edge artist Rob Briscoe, Dear Esther is a first-person experience and uses many of the narrative tricks familiar to Valve's games, silently building a story through the careful drawing of the world around you.

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Motorola Xoom 2 Tablet Reviews

The original Motorola Xoom was supposed to be the tablet which unseated Apple's iPad and established a glorious new era of Android-powered slate supremacy. It was running Google's first truly tablet-focused OS - codenamed Honeycomb - and offered blistering dual-core processing power.

Despite the considerable hype, the Xoom ultimately failed to live up to expectation. Compared to the slim and elegant iPad, it appeared chubby and unattractive. Google's software felt unfinished, and a worrying lack of tablet-specific applications - a problem exacerbated by Google's continuing insistence that developers create downloads that are able to function across both phones and large-screen devices - made it a hard sell. Within months, the Xoom was being heavily discounted by retailers, and other Android tablets swept in to steal the limelight.

Motorola is in this game for the long haul, though. Having recently been acquired by Google in a deal worth $12.5 billion, the American telecoms veteran is back in the ring with two new tablet devices: the Xoom 2 and the Xoom 2 Media Edition. Both boast dual-core processors and 1GB of RAM, and sport PowerVR SGX540 graphics processing units. In fact, the two tablets are practically identical, save for one fairly significant detail: the Xoom 2 has a 10.1-inch screen, while the Media Edition has a smaller 8.2-inch display.

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