Cubemen mostly succeeds with new take on tower defense

Cubemen’s aggressively simple design combined with clever manipulations of traditional genre mechanics creates play that is fun, but slightly too long.

The game presents the player with three game types. Each revolves around a variety of three-dimensional levels, two or more spawn points, and the titular cubemen, voxel-style humanoids with access to a variety of weapons and color coding.

Units within the game are split between two classes. The first are your soldiers, units purchased with the game’s currency that fall into the standard Tower Defense types, including slowing units, morters, flamethrowers and the rest. The second type are spawned cubemen, who are created automatically by enemy spawn points in the Defense gametype and by both sides’ spawns in Skirmish and Mayhem modes.

Thomas was Alone Leads Indies Up and to the Right

The titular character in Thomas was Alone is a medium sized block — a veritable “every square” of pixelated protagonists.  Clad in a sporty red chassis and the ability to jump a respectable distance, he begins as a newly awakened

Review: The Real Texas

  There’s something to be said for truth in advertising. One of the goals of marketing is  to try and sell a product to as many people as possible. This is all well and good when someone is hawking laundry

Vampires Just Want To Have Fun: The Adventures Of Shuggy

Some games try too hard. In an effort to please the widest audience and provide the roundest experience, developers cram copious amounts of (often underdeveloped) mechanics into a single project, making for a bloated, unfocused game. It is with this

Resonance impresses with remarkable narrative, gameplay

In Resonance, developer Vince Twelve has created one of gaming’s more dazzling narratives. The game is a pleasure to play.

Resonance puts you in control of four characters thrown together in a science fiction setting to prevent world-wide disaster. A high-quality adventure game, Resonance has some of the best storytelling you’ll encounter on the PC. This is complemented by an interesting cast of characters, excellent 2D pixel work, great music and some unique game mechanics.

How do you Solve a Problem Like Max Payne?

The man is a high-functioning alcoholic. He spends his nights drinking himself into oblivion while the light of day finds him planting heavy metals deep into the flesh of his enemies with the biologically-ingrained certainty of a fifth generation lead

Ticket to Ride shows the future of board games may be digital

When people talk about entry-level board games, the kind designed to get your buddies over the hobby’s notoriously high barrier for entry, a few games are mentioned. Settlers of Catan gets first billing as a classic. Then you have modern

ROCKSMITH and the victory over gamification

Gamification is a sexy buzz word. It was born from the assumption that people value the things they struggle to obtain more than the things they freely receive. And so, the behaviorist wizard assigned points and levels to everything. His spell dictated that we would become more motivated if we became aware that every level passed or song beaten was a stepping stone, an achievement.

It was under the lure of this magic man that I purchased Rocksmith, a rhythm game you play with a real guitar and whose goal is to teach you how to play it. Perhaps now, with the ethereal motivation provided by gamification, I would be finally able to switch from the G chord to the C chord without having to stop and mentally command my fingers to do so. It was an impulse buy to be sure, but one that ended up being my most played game of 2011.

And here is the twist: gamification didn’t do a damn thing.

Off to strange worlds in The Dream Machine

“I long for a kind of quiet where I can just drift and dream. I always say getting inspiration is like fishing. If you’re quiet and sitting there and you have the right bait, you’re going to catch a fish

Getting Knocked About by Trials Evolution

Whatever you do, don’t fall off. This is the axiom that lies at the heart of Trials Evolution. Ultimately it’s an easy concept to understand: get from one end of the track to the other whilst straddling your fuel-injected bronco, and try not