Posts By Mat Growcott

Battlefield is a franchise known for its more serious take on war and for its emphasis on teamwork and strategy. It got a following – and rightly so – for its large maps, it’s vehicles and its excellent community. Battlefield 3 is the first main entry in the series since Battlefield 2 was released in 2005 and is the first specifically for HD consoles. With top notch graphics and impressive animation, have DICE squeezed as much as they’re going to get out of the ...

It took an awful long time and a lot of legal wrangling with Blizzard for Valve to be able to call their new game DotA 2, but that’s what it is. In terms of spirit and content, this is the follow-up to the top Warcraft 3 mod that started a genre and remains popular to this day. Although the characters and maps aren’t a million miles away from those available in, for instance, League of Legends, it’s the unique polish and the effort placed into graphics and ...

Omerta – City of Gangsters had a lot of promise. It’s developed by the same people that make the endlessly fun Tropico series and promises a Gangster-based strategy game, not really something we’ve seen since the sequel to the Eidos classic Gangsters: Organized Crime. The incredibly high price point at least hints at the idea that Omerta has been worked on to the level that’s deserving of that amount of money. Gangster Sims are criminally overlooked and I’m ...

When Valve announced Left 4 Dead 2, the internet imploded. Fans had been promised a wealth of DLC, long-lasting support and now the developers had had the nerve to release a sequel. After mild controversy around launch and a steady sale-by-sale drop in price, this is a game that has become increasingly difficult to resist. Not only has the price dropped, but the content in the game has been expanded on as well. Along with the original five campaigns, Left 4 ...

The Cave brings together Monkey Island alumni Tim Schaefer and Ron Gilbert for a brand new adventure game unlike anything you’re likely to have played before. Pick from a cast of seven characters and explore a dark cave where anything is possible, where your character’s traits are tested over and over again. With the hilarious writing and critical thinking that made the genre great in the nineties, The Cave is a nostalgic look back at a time when games were ...

The original Sims game was a massive leap forward for gaming. News articles were run announcing that AI had finally got to a point where little people could run around inside your computer and teenage boys everywhere were making the girls they knew at school WooHoo in heart-shaped vibrating beds. Finally, a game where you could truly define the lives of your characters – so long as they weren’t hopping up and down on the spot or burning the house down. The Sims ...

Guardians of Middle-Earth is the first MOBA game made specifically for consoles and the first set in the Lord of the Rings universe. That alone would make it worth playing, but the fact that it’s a big part of PlayStation+ (or that it’s going to be, depending on your location) should push that excitement over the edge. Good or bad, this is a title that is part of MOBA history and as MOBA is one of the most popular genres in the world right now, that’s a pretty ...

Dead Space 3 brings a lot to the franchise that has had long-time fans hesitant in their purchase. Trailers and the demo seem to show a game not so much survival horror as third person action, more like Gears of War than Dead Space. In an industry not generally interested in scaring those that want to be scared, major franchises dropping the horror element that made them big is a problem for many, but does that mean that action and horror aren’t at all ...

Lord of the Rings: War of the North was supposed to be a darker, more adult game for those of us old enough to appreciate the films when they first came out. It was going to have a deeper story, more intense combat (complete with decapitations and blood – adult stuff) and it was going to show a side to Middle Earth we’d rarely seen, let alone in video games. War of the North was also publisher Warner Brothers’ first chance to show the world what they could do ...

Call of Duty has become a yearly phenomenon, breaking record after record on an annual basis. Black Ops 2, the latest in the series, is no exception, bringing together an action packed single player story and a set of chaotic, fast paced multiplayer games to create what is arguably one of the best arcade shooters of this generation. The addition of Treyarch's popular Zombies mode is only that stretch extra. Call of Duty may have its fair share of detractors, ...