Good evening San Franciso! Are you ready to rock? Woo! Yeah!

If you don’t read a lot of Polish Fantasy, you might have missed the wildly successful books that the Witcher games are based on. If you missed the games as well, you probably have narcolepsy and therefore deserve all the pity you can get. The first was a smash hit by CD Projekt, a Polish company who cut their teeth translating classics like Planescape: Torment and Baldur’s Gate for their home audience, as well as making their own stuff. They clearly love their roleplaying games, and that love is made apparent in the sheer size, detail and number of fan-service boob shots in this excellent addition to their titles.

Geralt is a Witcher, i.e. a genetically enhanced killer of monsters, trained with blades, bombs and traps from an early age. But the monsters he fights to earn his keep are so ludicrously lethal that even with all that under his belt, he still has to neck down poisonous potions to give himself the edge he needs. The world he haunts is a dark and brutal medieval one. The muddy peasants are beset by scheming and uncaring rulers on one side, gibbering horrors from the woods on the other. If that wasn’t enough, there’s the simmering racial tension from the poorly-integrated dwarves and elves, and the freedom fighters of those races (the Scoi’atel, or Squirrels), to contend with as well. As sorceresses and lords plot the political fate of the lands, Geralt struggles to deal with his own love life, his broken memory and the fact that he’s just been framed for killing his pal King Foltest by a giant murderer with arms like sides of ham.

Sealife Expansion - Play as a Hermit Crab! Fight Ariel from the Little Mermaid!

The game kicks off with Garrett being beaten up in a dungeon by some thuggish guards. Not sure why? Neither is he, entirely, he’s got RPG-Hero’s Disease, or Amnesia as modern doctors call it. As you learn the ropes through the recap/prologue/tutorial, you get to learn exactly how he ended up there, and then decide how he gets out. It’s a great and cinematic way in, and it shows off the game’s glossy graphics engine to full effect as you assault a walled town. Blazing arrows rain from above, armoured knights clank about smacking each other with sharpened steel and a lot of attractively naked women almost show you their bits. It’s violent, sexy stuff, not dissimilar to the Games of Thrones TV series in terms of content and approach to fantasy.

Sexy and violent though it is, however, it’s not a great tutorial by itself. There’s a separate tutorial section, a sort of brief prequel to the game, that takes you through that. It wasn’t available on the original launch, and this was one of the biggest criticisms leveled at the game back then. Because it’s not easy – Geralt is super-hard, super-fast and super-dangerous. But he’s all too human, and unless you’ve got a good handle on his many abilities, he can die of involuntary pointy steel insertion as easily as the next man. His potions, their brewing and consumption, are essential to get the hang of before you play. Without them, combat is exceptionally taxing. It’s fast, frenetic and not above throwing quick time events at you when you’re not expecting them. It’s amazingly realised, with pirouetting knights and exploding zombies agogo, but it’s also challenging. Poor timing can get you killed as easily as poor planning, especially in some very one-sided boss fights. You can expect a lot of repetition until you get practiced. Although to be frank, you can sometimes get by through button-mashing, which leads me to suspect the controls could use a little tidying. It’s a lot better than the original, though, which was far too hard to begin with.

The fights are fluid, dynamic and visceral, and hence a real pleasure to watch.

But I didn’t mind this. The plot and presentation make up for any mild frustration at the combat difficulty. The level of detail and believability in this world is excellent. It’s got all the nooks and crannies and crafting that Skyrim has, but in a much dirtier, more realistic depiction of fantasy medieval life. You’re very much in the seamy underbelly of the world here. Drunks piss on walls outside the tavern. Ugly peasants shelter from the rain and call you a freakish bastard behind your back. Hookers and drug dealers trick or blackmail you into helping them. Helping them is usually what you’re trying to do, just to earn enough scratch to get by in life, but don’t expect gratitude with your measly coin pouch. The people who are supposed to be your friends are usually taking advantage of your amnesia to get your sword on their side without really telling you why. It all feels thoroughly believable, if dirtily so. There’s an amazing and enjoyable variety of characters to interact with, and they’re all as entertainingly foul-mouthed and filthy-minded as you’d expect from something whose predecessor involved a collectable set of cards representing all the people you could shag in-game.

Lots of NPCs like to get their tops off in this game. The lead isn't above it himself, which is great if hideous scars are your thing.

The sex is still on, with plenty of fairly graphic cut scenes. Lovely if you like that kind of thing, which I absolutely don’t because my wife could walk in behind me at any moment. It’s restricted more to the main plot than it used to be, but I’m happy with that myself. Rather than womanising his way through every village he gets to, I prefer my Geralt to focus on his angsty past and kidnapped girlfriend. And in the meantime, he can go around aiding or preventing local crime as the mood takes me, desperately saving up enough coin through winning arm wrestles and bar fights in order to get the equipment he desperately needs to take on any of the monster quests. They pay better, but even a professional Witcher with a pack full of explosives will need a few upgrades, or at least good (and expensive) intelligence before trying to take on a pack of giant beetles.

Geralt's so dark and brooding, he sometimes blends into the backgrounds.

I like this. It all feels gritty and dirty and realistic. It’s a struggle to get by financially as a Witcher, as we all know from personal experience. You need to think a bit about what you’re taking on and how to do it, rather than just grinding for loot. But it could be slow and a little over-tough to a more casual gamer. The size of the game makes pacing a slight issue, too – if you’re trapped in a town besieged by not just wraiths but invading kings too, do you really have time to fetch 88 harpy feathers for the crazy old man in the quarry? But you’re always rewarded if you do put the time in, with well-written quests and moral choices that genuinely make you wrestle. Even the harpy feather quest proves to be well worth it in the end. No easy good-v-bad stuff here, just lots of murk. Both sides in any argument are always well-justified, and you can really feel the consequences of your actions when people you like or sympathise with get it in the neck. And there is a huge amount of content, including two entirely different versions of act 2 depending on your earlier choices. Like the combat, it’s more focused than the original Witcher, though, and there’s much less trudging across the same three streets over and over.

We found a Witcher! May we burn him?

The voice acting is excellent, especially the Scottish and Welsh accents featured on a lot of the characters. Good music too. The script’s a bit incoherent in places, although often very funny, and there are many poorly-introduced characters, people you are perhaps expected to know of from the books. The full extent of the politicking going on is probably only apparent to real fans. But the journal system is comprehensive and very entertainingly written – I’d recommend it to clear up any confusion, it’s sometimes easier to follow than the cut scenes. Geralt is a master of po-faced sarcasm, but despite his many primal ur-man moments remains intelligent and sympathetic throughout. The graphics are stunning, giving an indelible sense of place and time rarely matched in other similar games.

Is that Liverpool? Sod it, then, I'm going home.

And best of all, the game’s makers have been slowly adding in new features since the launch. The tutorial I mentioned came with a free combat arena expansion. And this month sees the release of the Enhanced Edition, which all previous editions automatically upgrade to. It adds even more depth, quests and characters than ever before. This is a good game, and a good time to buy it. Get in there.

But there must always be hope, hope that good can once more rise in a time of darkness. So stay awhile, and listen, as I tell you of those who came before. Perhaps their story will inspire you to greatness. Or perhaps it will be one last forlorn tale in the dusk, before the candles flicker and die for all time.

So this is Hell. I wonder where the bathrooms are - I'll ask that angel. What? There are none? NOOOOOOO

What do you mean, you’ve no idea what the hell I’m on about? Diablo 3 is out next month. Are you not really a PC gamer at all? Is the internet merely what you call the gaps between the rope in your fishing gear? Or were you too busy actually achieving at the turn of the millenium to notice this gigantic slice of gaming wonder?

Blizzard are one of the modern kings of gaming, ruling the roost with titles like Starcraft and World of Warcraft (and if you haven’t heard of them, please please please write to me and explain what you’re doing on this website). Their games are legendarily long and slow in development, and then absurdly exquisite to play – bright, shiny, near-bugless testaments to detail and playability that really do raise the bar every time they get released.

With the launch website now firmly promoting the latest addition to this classic series (http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/?-), I thought it might be worth revisiting the last one out of a nostalgic desire to dispose of any remaining free time I might have.

The original Diablo tells the story of a nameless hero who descends into a labyrinth of evil and madness under a cathedral near the sleepy hollow of Tristram. The undead have recently awoken in the catacombs, and there are demons popping out of the woodwork to wreak havoc on the realm. In these dusty crypts, the hero discovers the mighty demon lord Diablo has possessed the king’s son, and is poised to open a gate to hell to allow his minions to destroy the world. Until he gets ganked for phat loots, anyway.

In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion is butchered for gold and collectables.

Diablo 2 takes up the tale a few years on – that nameless hero wasn’t quite as successful as he’d hoped. He’s taken Diablo’s soulstone, hoping to destroy it forever, but instead gets corrupted and tainted by the trapped demon within. Diablo takes control of him, and forces him on a quest to release his fallen brothers Mephisto and Baal, the other two Prime Evils. And once that done, they can take over the world of Sanctuary and make gnarly demon madness the ruling order of the day.

So it’s up to you now to follow in the footsteps of the fallen hero and undo his misguided actions by slaying all three of the Prime Evils. Mephisto and Diablo are the big bosses in the original game, then the Lord of Destruction added their brother Baal in a final set of levels, and it’s that expansion, the fullest version of the game, that I’ve been replaying here.

It’s all about ten or more years old now, and although I’ve got incredibly fond memories of it, I’ve got incredibly fond memories of Gauntlet from the early 80s. Time, my tastes and the general expectation of games have all moved on a great deal since then. I wouldn’t spend money to be told that the Warrior Needs Food Badly any more. Does D2:LOD stand the test of time?

So many to choose from, so few hours left in my wasted life. Make sure they all have stupid names, that's vital.

By all your darkened gods, yes. Okay, graphically it’s rusty. 800X600 is a little blocky for most modern monitors. But in terms of the art depicted, those lovingly rendered pixels still hurl you into a brilliantly realised world. Ravaged by the demon minions of hell, the once verdant wastes are full of destruction, terror and hatred (see what I did there, fans?) made flesh in a once beautiful land.

Everything is tainted – the corpses of guards rot on spikes and totems, cottages and wagon trains lie ruined and in flames. The ancient ruins of the world are haunted with monsters and daubed with monstrous icons, and from even the most remote corners and highest peaks, the depredations of Diablo’s creations can be seen. This is a world on the brink of damnation, as the packs of twisted horrors that descend on you from every crevice will testify.

And nothing is just art for art’s sake – much of this detail can be interacted with. Hollow logs hide treasure. Barrels and pots can be smashed and searched. Ancient tomes tell of old legends – follow the clues and complete hidden quests. And best of all, each of the five main levels (moorlands, desert, jungle, hell, mountainous plateau) are very much their locations with their own individual looks, so you rarely get bored with the scenery. The scenery even affects gameplay convincingly – the same tactics for a wide-open desert plain won’t help in the cramped corners of a ruined dungeon. Plus every time you start a new game, the levels are randomly generated.

Although broadly the same in terms of what and where you go, the sidequests and cellars of the world are always different. You’re always exploring, and always finding something new. The sound and soundtrack both fit perfectly with this – the haunting shrieks and moans of the monsters are accompanied by eerie and evocative music that really brings the world to life. The bubbling of a health potion as you desperately slug it back is iconic, as is the cry of ‘Rakanishu!’ from the early demons.

I love this M.C. Escher inspired level, full of bleating goatmen and optical illusions.

This is a hack’n'slash rpg, an arcadey joy that’s not entirely removed from my childhood sweetheart, Gauntlet. It’s a top-down view of your hero, and you point and click on what you want to interact with – opening doors, exploding crates, collecting loot. And of course slaughtering the legions of opponents, a cavalcade of demonic freaks who are as incredible in their variety as they are challenging to fight.

You start out easy, with shambling zombies and cowardly imps. And it’s always a pleasure to bash them down and watch the detailed animations of them bursting, falling apart in showers of hilarious gore or tumbling to burnt ashes. Your attacks can be upgraded with a wealth of elemental effects, all of which are depicted in loving detail – frost can freeze and then shatter a foe into lumps of melting ice, for example, or lightning send them twitching and crackling to the floor.

And however wild and crazy the action gets, with later levels full of teleporting, fire-hurling monsters whose masters resurrect them or turn them into suicide bombers, you always have a handle on what’s happening.

After a battle, the floor is littered with corpses and treasure. That glowing blue portal takes you home to the shops, it's the fantasy equivalent of an iPad.

Whatever you kill drops cash, new weapons and gear. Some is magical, some is better than magical, some even form complete sets with added bonuses. You can collect and upgrade gems that can then further enhance your chosen armour or swords. Fitting yourself out is easy, with a very straightforward drag-and-drop paper doll portrait of your hero that has since become instantly familiar to most RPG inventories.

But choosing what to keep and what to sell, and which bonuses stack best with your abilities, is a constant struggle. You can’t carry much before you need to nip home and sell off your newest haul. You’re always torn between exploring just a little further and running to the nearest town to get your latest finds identified, fixed up by the blacksmith and then put into action.

Here's the famous paper doll. I've got a crown on a stick and a lot of ribena.

A choice of five different heroes in the original was expanded to seven in Lord of Destruction. This also added new item variants, new class-specific weapons and armour and a host of new monsters, levels and upgradable odds and ends, like the runestones that can spell words of power on your gear or the magical charms that give you new boosts just by sitting in your inventory. The endless replayability of the game is a legend, I think – every hero you create will have their own unique levels. And finishing a game once opens a new, harder playthrough featuring tougher monsters and better loot.

I’ve never finished a run-through of Hell difficulty, the hardest – my necromancer just couldn’t hack losing experience every time he died. And by then, it was pretty much every time someone hit him. You really need to carefully balance your gear to survive, and patient stat balancing isn’t my strong suit. But I still loved trying to work out tactics that would let me proceed. Even being hammered by the game is fun, and that’s a mark of genius.

Those heroes all play very differently, too. Barbarians are close combat monsters, dishing out frenetic melee damage with dual-wielding blades or huge two-handers. Amazons use bows and spears to nimbly bring death from afar. Sorceresses hurl massive AOE ranged elemental damage in fire, lightning and frost flavour. The valiant Paladin is a good all-rounder, with auras to boost a team or devastate the undead. And the necromancer curses foes, hurls poison bolts and walls of bone, then raises the dead to serve him with his own ranks of minions.

The later additions were just as fun – the druid is an elemental mix of summoner and DOT, or can focus on turning into a werecreature and dealing horrible physical damage, the assassin can be a close-up physical dual wielder or a sewer of traps and tricks to harass and slay monsters – but both felt like mixes of existing classes, albeit interesting ones that allowed for unexpected mixes of ability. And all of these have three distinct classes of skills. You can generalise in all three, but you won’t be as powerful as a character that picks just one focus. It’s great to play around with this and try new combinations to get that perfect killing machine, and believe me, you need one for the top difficulty settings.

The Amazon rains death from afar with bow or javelin. Unless you'd rather run up close and finish the job personally with a deft bit of prodding. As she said to the bishop.

Multiplayer, handled by the formidable Battlenet lobby system to prevent cheats and pirates, allows either co-op play with tougher monsters and better gear, or PvP settings where you can take your hero up against other players to see who’s got the best skill sets. Bragging rights abound – kill another player to take a copy of their ear, for example, proving you killed them. It’s fast-paced action with compulsive gameplay.

Every time you think you’ve worked out a good set of weapons and attacks, a new monster or a new player will challenge this, forcing you to adapt or die. There’s even a hardcore more where you get one life and one life only – how far through the game can you get before your inevitable demise?

There are a few complaints – the quests aren’t the most varied or intelligent, mostly being a set of ‘go here and kill that’ types. They’re handed out by rather static NPCs, nicely voiced (especially worldly-wise Deckard Cain) but not terribly interestingly presented. After your first playthrough, you’ll almost certainly be clicking past them. The cinematics at the end of each chapter are still great and well-written, telling the story with aplomb, but haven’t aged well graphically. And there is a danger of monotony – so much random generation can get dull, as items and champion monsters start feeling like you’ve seen them before.

The economy is a bit lame. You end up with zillions of gold and not much to bother spending it on, apart from resurrecting your henchman (oh yes, there are henchman, and you can equip them and upgrade them and hug them and squeeze them) and fixing broken stuff. But the shops in the towns don’t give you loot worth buying, it’s much more fun and rewarding to pull your new blades randomly out of some recently-eviscerated goatman or a chattering demon headhunter.

The age of the game also means you have to expect a few graphical glitches if you’re playing on a modern operating system like Windows Vista or 7, which is annoying but not unbearable.

Well that's just bloody typical.

Overall, if you missed this, you missed a classic that’s still well-worth playing. There are good imitators out there, like Torchlight or Titan Quest, that may have a modern edge on graphics. But this beats them on sheer variety, replayability and setting. It beats them into a Brilliant Cocked Hat of the Moon, using a Toxic Cudgel of the Leech. You can pick the original and the expansion up from Blizzard for a total of £20, which is a very fair price for a huge and wonderful game.

You’ve still got a month, which this will amply fill, before the sequel arrives. I can’t imagine anything they’re releasing will not be up to scratch, Blizzard’s reputation is pretty impeccable in that regard, although almost £50 is a lot even for a new game. If you can bear waiting, you might want to hold off. I couldn’t, thousands won’t, and I doubt any of us will be disappointed.

The most pressing question I have is this – Diablo and his brothers were destroyed in the last game, and the trailers for part three suggest that a new demon is trying to take over the throne of the Burning Hells. But given the name of the game, and that Big Burning Red was the end of game boss the last two times, it’s surely a given he’s found a way back from death somehow. Hasn’t he?

By Fantasy Law, all Fantasy Games must include at least one world map of this quality or above. Tolkein said so.

Here’s the protocol – you must release a game that involves defending a tower. Said tower must be defended from waves of enemies. Said enemies approach along a fixed path or paths. Said paths can be defended by the construction of automated defence towers along them, which fire a variety of missiles to deal with the enemies. The enemies get stronger over time, but you can upgrade your defence towers to be more effective. You do this by spending your currency, which is earned at a fixed rate and also supplemented by the death of your foes. So as long as you build an effective defence, it will earn enough to stay effective. Fall off this curve, and the bad guys will inevitably break through and muller your base.

Defenders of Ardania is set in the same world as Majesty 2, a game I reviewed last year. Enough people bought and enjoyed that game, an RTS with a quirky command system where you had to bribe your units to get them to do your bidding, that I suppose there’s some merit in setting this interesting Tower Defence game in the same world. It also clearly saves the designers a lot of time and hassle – the graphics, particularly the backgrounds, look to be lifted straight out of the Majesty 2 stable. No bad thing, those are good looking games. The level design wanders neatly through a good variety of jungles, mountainous regions, deserts and forests, and there’s always something pretty to look at. The sound is okay too, standard if inoffensive stirring fantasy epic overtures romping away in the background as you play. And the Sean Connery impersonator who introduces all the levels in Majesty 2 is back as well, familiar and cheering as he delivers his gentle fantasy piss-take intros.

Good old PseudoSean. Real Sean must really envy him this gig.

The other big thing a tower defence game needs these days is a twist. It needs to develop new and interesting mechanics just to stand out in the crowd. Hence we have like Orcs Must Die giving you a sort of FPS version along with cartoony violence, or Rock of Ages with its head-to-head stone rolling mechanic (a game so wildly different it’s barely even recognisable as tower defence), or that one with the aliens where you control the attacking creeps rather than the turrets, or those ones on Steam where it’s multiplayer co-op. There are literally too many for me to enumerate them all.

Defenders of Ardania has the twist that you must both attack and defend at once. So must your opponent, so the paths that your units follow is a grid system which you’re also both struggling for control of in order to build your turrets in the sweet spots. Some spots give you extra income, others extra range. Some turrets and units can attacks and destroy enemy towers, others can wipe out incoming enemy units. You have spells to heal buildings or wipe out attackers, a system of upgrades for units, towers and global abilities and a choice of three teams to pick from. And you can even tweak the paths your units take so that they follow a route of your choice rather than traipsing merrily into the nearest thicket of spear towers.

Here's the grid, a clunky overlay that doesn't add much to the look of the game. Playing without it is much harder and very frustrating.

This is an admirable and quite impressive set of ideas, one that could turn tower defence into an almost chess-like strategic battle with elements of RTS integrated. For my money, it falls way short of what it could achieve. The UI is dense and pretty unintuitive, so you need to click on your home base to open the menu from which you select attackers, for example. This isn’t as convenient as I’d like when I’m also trying to simultaneously juggle tower building and upgrades from a different set of menus. Having the ‘release wave’ controls built into an obvious menu at the bottom, like the hotkey bars in WOW and such, would make a huge difference. Against the computer, which can multitask with smooth efficiency, it’s quite a struggle to get on top of everything. You can’t see anyone’s health points without pressing certain buttons to get an overlay – fine, that reduces the info on screen, but it’s quite important info. How much health your units and your opponents have is really key to doing well in a TD game, this should be much easier info to get.

The levels also look terribly crowded. Pretty, but busy – it’s like Where’s Wally meets Kingdom Rush. Kingdom Rush, by the way, is an excellent browser-based TD game that you can play for free on sites like Kongregate. It’s an excellent example of why a good tower defence game doesn’t really need a bunch of whistles and bells to make it fun. It’s simple yet tricky, lovely to look at without being confusing and full of tactical choices which have swift and easy-to-follow effects on the game. Everything in Defenders of Ardania feels rather murky to me because it’s so hard to see what’s going on. Zoom out and you lose focus on what units are where and how well they’re doing. Zoom in and it’s hard to retain global control, it’s still hard to see how the units are doing, and you can focus instead on how robotic and dull their animations are. Flaming boulders and arrows crash and thud into these lively little sprites, and they march on with barely a spout of blood. It’s surprisingly utilitarian, given how shiny it looks from a distance.

Zoom in close and you can see your oblivious mannequins dying. Yawn. And you're not even all that close.

Playing the campaign, which slowly leads you into the game like a good story-based tutorial should, is pretty tedious. The game is quite slow paced; there may well be a way of speeding it up, but I either couldn’t find it in the tangled control panel or the campaign hadn’t introduced me to that function yet. The plot I think you could easily guess – a terrible evil from the past of the kingdom has arisen and only you can muster the blah to blah the blahblah and blah the blah of blah. There are honest to god monkeys generating this shit at a typewriter, I swear to god. Badly paid hack monkeys who are lifting it wholesale from Tolkein ripoffs.

Multiplayer might be better than the relentless tides an AI can effortlessly swamp you with. I did try, the kindly developers having sent a pack of game keys so that I could get my friends hooked. Sadly, repeated attempts to set up an online game just got the same error message, that the game lobby no longer existed. Checking the forums shows this is a major issue, and the fix involves faffing about with your Steam config files to get the right ports talking to each other. Whatever that means, IP routing is just so much gobbledegook to me. It’s sort of irrelevant, though. What both of us had already experienced of the game didn’t really make us want to persevere or sort out whatever glitch we were experiencing. We actually went and played a few rounds of Dawn of War instead, old-school Soulstorm, in which relentless waves of AI utterly crushed us repeatedly over the next two hours. I guess we didn’t really miss much.

What? Where? How can I? I don't understand what's happening! And I've stopped caring. On level 2.

Overall? A wasted opportunity, I reckon, with similar flaws to Majesty 2 in some ways. Interesting ideas well presented but ultimately lacking in solid gameplay. Pity – there’s clearly a lot of intelligence in the design team here, I like their style and their approach. But the core game on top of these ideas just doesn’t quite cut the mustard, especially when there are so many other really good tower defence games worth playing. Orks Must Die and Kingdom Rush are my current favourites, I’d pick the former if you want to spend money and the latter if you don’t. And look, Majesty 2 wasn’t without flaws either. Bluntly, I’m surprised that this equally flawed game was a good use of development time. Is it something the fans were really clamouring for, or just a convenient way to make a buck from an older game engine? I think everyone can do better, both the creators and anyone thinking of getting it.

Spoiler alert: This review may contain spoilers on plot, sequences, and missions. Note: This review uses Corsair Obsidian 700d, Corsair 750w Psu, Intel i7 930 @ 3.2 w/ cooler master v8, GIGABYTE GA-X58A-UD3R, Gskill 6gigs, EVGA gtx 275 superclocked edition, system.

Overview:

The ground around you becomes hazy, you try to focus your attention to your wounds. Blood dripping, you’re battered and exhausted. You slowly stagger up the stairs when your flashlight goes out. The air is thick, lockers torn open, and papers covering the floors. Lights out, nothing but faint voices of children echoing all around you. You raise your gun, aware of the incoming danger. Walking near blind in the Elementary school, you make for the nearest light source. The laughter only gets louder as you panic down the hallway. You stumble face first into the ground. The voices stop, only the sound of your exhaling carries through the building. You slowly get up and notice two deathly pale feet in front of you; you stagger back only to see an empty hallway. You make for the classroom, as you open the door a sudden shock brings you into a field. You look around to make sure you’re not dreaming, you feel the breeze as it hits you. You hear the same child’s laughter. You proceed to the tree swing. A loud scream shocks you back into reality, as you’re pulled in the room.

Fear 2, not only immerses you into the story, but successfully incorporates the term “survival”. Fear is  short for “First Encounter Assault Recon”, where in the first game you play as “Point Man”. The whole game involves around a character named Alma, and a company called Armacham. Armacham is a R & D company that deals with military technologies, in this case dealing with “replica soldiers” and physic abilities. The game revolves around your character, Michael Becket, and his struggle to survive this impending apocalypse.

From Fear 1, Fear 2 remains the same with in the game play with some features removed; leaning. Although players are able to jump into the game with ease, the game becomes rather stale in game play. When you’re not in a suit of power armor, you’re on foot approaching linear paths and triggered events. The story is where FEAR 2 really shines in terms of keeping the gamer playing. Prior knowledge of FEAR 1 is recommended, because the plot may seem it has a lot of holes otherwise. In each mission you’re pitted against new enemies, and have to deal with the “attacks” from Alma.

The AI is another high point for FEAR 2, they are one of the few AI programmed to wander through any level depending on the situation appointed to them. You may end up fighting a single unit or an army based upon how you engage. This brings up the re-playability value,  but not by much. You can’t expect the AI to change up that many tactics in an office room. Unlike other series such as COD, the AI are reasonable in their abilities, never stepping over the boundaries and being just plain absurd. Other than the AI, and some memorable sections in the single player there aren’t many reason why you would go back.

Audio/Graphics:

FEAR 2 tries to emulate what it would be like if you were in the position of Becket. Music is used subtlety, and mostly it’s just the sounds of your running and gunning. However when you’re pitted against the supernatural powers of Alma, things get intense. Not only do your hairs rear up, you also turn on the nearest light near you. The game does a phenomenal job when it comes time to frighten the audience.

FEAR 2 has its own style that’s represented in its graphics. Everything is gritty, and given a vintage look. It may have been because of nuclear explosion, or an evil demon child but the game itself looks good. The lighting is where you’re able to see the beauty of FEAR 2′s capabilities, however when you’re exposed to the outdoor environment, one can’t help but notice its aging engine.

Multiplayer :

Honestly, there really isn’t much to talk about. There aren’t many individuals that play FEAR 2 online, and when there is a server full, you end up playing with the same individuals. Modes that FEAR2 offers are tdm, dm, ctf, and other modes it’s fun but with a small community don’t expect it to keep you hooked for long.

Pros:

-Very immersive single player campaign

-New mechanics that have not been established in any fps.

-Single player lasts about 7+ hours (depending on difficulty)

Cons:

-Low re-playability

-Triggered events

-Multiplayer although fun, you end up playing with the same 20 people.

Orcs Must Die! is essentially a hybrid between tower-defense and third-person action, with rpg elements thrown into the mix in the form of unlockables and what some would call skill-trees. There is a story, but like most games of this type, it really isn’t the point of the game and is mainly used as an excuse to make fun of the main character (you) and to provide a background setting. You are a poor excuse of an apprentice of a poor excuse of a mage, and due to various circumstances, you are the only hope of humanity against an ever-increasing horde of Orcs. Bla bla, to be honest I paid attention for a very short while until I was handed control of the various glorious traps and devices – all aimed at slaughtering as many Orcs as possible. Did I mention this game involves killing Orcs? Loads and loads of Orcs.

I love the smell of burnt orcs in the morning.

In the first levels you don’t have much in the form of traps, and rely mostly on a few basic spikes, tar to slow your enemy down and your trusty weapon: a rather destructive crossbow. Your arsenal quickly expands, and you unlock new goodies every map you complete. Most of the traps are predictable, but there are a few pretty awesome ones – and all of them feel pretty punchy in action. The net result is absolute mayhem and destruction – with orcs being splattered, shot, burned, frozen and otherwise gutted in large numbers.

Pounder, that sounds sufficiently painful. (And it is!)

It doesn’t take long before you start unlocking Guardians which essentially are npc units that you can place on the map, such as archers and melee units – which help defend your rift. As in any tower defense game, your main goal is to prevent enemies from reaching your the heart of the map (in this case a rift, or on some maps multiple rifts), and each enemy which does reach it reduces the life of the rift until it reaches 0 and you lose. To prevent the Orcs from getting there, you use a combination of aforementioned traps, guardians and your personal spells. At the start of each map you select which traps and spells you wish to equip from the ones you unlocked, and off you go. This system means that going back to earlier maps once you’ve unlocked more powerful traps, spells and guardians can be pretty rewarding. (And fun!)

None shall pass! Archers are incredibly useful.

To add more depth to this, you also unlock ‘weavers’ which really just means you get access to skill trees. You can pick from a few trees, and these reset each map. Each skill/perk/ability (name it what you like) costs ‘money’ – so you have to carefully balance this with the purchase of traps and guardians between waves. All of this adds a nice layer of tactical depth – which combined with the fast-paced action makes Orcs Must Die! a very enjoyable experience. The developers seem to have managed to balance just the right mix of pace, destruction and strategy and experiencing this from within the map rather than the traditional top-down view in tower-defense game makes this much more immersive.

Wall Blades provide an adequate level of gore.

Now the game costs £12 on Steam, which I personally think is a little steep for a game like this. Yes, it’s highly enjoyable but it does wear off pretty quickly and I doubt that anyone is going to play this for a huge number of hours. If you can pick it up for about half that price during a sale, it is however totally and utterly worth it. Orcs Must Die! is an example of what Indie gaming is all about and there hasn’t been a tower defense game that was as decent since Defense Grid: The Awakening.

Still not convinced? Then watch some Orcs getting slaughtered below:

Global Agenda is a free-to-play mmo, mostly a shooter with some tiny bits of rpg blended into the mix. You get to choose from 4 classes: Assault, Medic, Recon and Robotic – and each perform very different functions in group-based content. Most of the game is based on PvP – though there is no open-world PvP whatsoever. All PvP is handled in battlegrounds and AvA, with more about that later in the review. You do get the usual MMO features: there are quests, gear, shops, crafting, auction houses, etc. Don’t expect weeks of content though, I played the game for a week straight and exhausted all quest content on 3 different classes. That said, it takes a while to get to maximum level and there are plenty of things to unlock.

Don't worry, I'll heal you.. By shooting you in the face with this green goo.

In terms of the classes, the Assault is essentially the tank class. Armed with miniguns, rocket launchers and skills based around damage mitigation this class can take a serious punch, as well as do an incredibly amount of dps. The medic is exactly what it sounds like: a class mainly based on healing, though you do have the option to spec poison and do a decent amount of damage. Most people will however expect you to heal them, so the vast majority of medics are healing specced. The recon is the stealth / sniper class and does by far the most dps of any of the classes. The last class, the robotic, is what one could call the ‘pet class’. Extremely versatile and largely a support class, the robotic places stations and turrets that heal, buff and do damage. The majority of gametime by a robotic is spend setting up and repairing their stations and turrets.

Obviously any class with stealth needs a katana.

As far as gameplay is concerned, besides for the quest content the game has instances which are grouped in medium security, high security, max security and ultra-max security. In a nutshell, the boss of the lower level becomes a normal mob in the next level up – so these are exponentially harder. The latter two are quite unforgiving and playing with people who don’t communicate or are completely ignorant can be an exercise in frustration. Since this is a free-to-play game, one can purchase a so called ‘Elite Agent’ status for a one-off fee of around £15 – which provides a substantial increase in experience, tokens, credits and most importantly: provides loot from instances and other activities. On top of this, players can buy a booster which doubles the rewards, and stacks with Elite Agent. Free players might find this a little irritating, but it’s done in a reasonably tasteful manner and isn’t too obnoxious.

There are tons of options for customising your colour scheme and looks - a nice touch. Most long-term players fly their Agency (guild) colours.

Other nice touches include the fact that all your characters share the same name, so people can easily identify you. They also all share the same inventory, credits, tokens, everything except gear which is ‘bound’ to that character. The nice thing is that you can purchase an item for your cosmetic slots and it becomes available for all your characters. Similarly, you can swap between classes without being penalized in progress when it comes to tokens/credits – which makes a nice difference from other MMOs. As a result, it’s much easier to find groups as people are far more willing to use different characters, especially once they’ve reached maximum level (50 at the moment).

Last thing worth mentioning is the so-called ‘AvA’, Alliance vs. Alliance PvP. I only dabbled in this a very short while, but I really liked what I saw. This essentially is the organised mass-scale PvP, where alliances fight over maps divided in hexes and conquer/defend territory during specific seasons that last a specific amount of time. Alliances can build facilities on these hexes, get resources, bring in dropships with support equipment that can be used during matches, etc. etc. It’s really rather in-depth and pretty much anyone interested in PvP participates in this. The game keeps long-term halls of fame, and the good/competitive alliances are well-respected within the community so it can be a very rewarding experience. Matches are 10vs10 affairs and are extremely well organised by the alliances which want to have any chance of success. If you like PvP, I’d definitely recommend giving this a go.

Every single instance or PvP fight has a statistics screen. Fantastic for people addicted to numbers, like myself.

So would I recommend Global Agenda? Considering the game is free, if you have some spare time on your hands and you have a passing interest in MMOs or shooters, I’d definitely give it a go. It doesn’t take long to level a character to a point where you can PvP or do other interesting activities (raids, for example) and largely speaking it’s a pretty decent game. Don’t expect to be absolutely amazed, as it’s not really on par with the paid alternatives, but ultimately this game is free. Even if you end up paying for Elite Agent (which is highly recommended) and perhaps a booster here and there you are still getting a very good deal. I certainly enjoyed my time, and if it wasn’t for the huge titles coming out this time of the year I’d probably still be playing.

Utterly not, is my opinion. I’d qualify that by immediately adding that it depends a lot on how broken a game is, and obviously there are lots of factors at work here. Financial pressure on the dev team, manpower and time issues, the impossibility of knowing exactly how a game will run on every jerry-rigged PC across the world, how many quantum butterflies recently flapped their wings, price of tea in China, etc etc etc. At heart, however, the answer must be no – it just isn’t fair on customers to release a game at full price if you know it has severe issues. And it certainly isn’t even remotely fair if you know it has severe issues, don’t mention it to anyone and then hope you can get away with it, as seemed to be the case with Kerberos and Paradox’s launch of Sword of the Stars II.

Combat looks great, really great. Much better than it currently plays.

On it’s launch almost a month ago, the game was broken to the point of incomprehensible. Random crashing, faulty UI, graphics errors and text and gameplay placeholders everywhere, many of which made playing the game impossible. There was lots of public browbeating from the developers, who claimed some kind of mystery crash meant the wrong game code was released whilst the real game code was wiped out. That seems a little incredible to me, indicating careless stupidity at best and woeful incompetence at worst. But as well as public apologising from the devs and the publishers, there were grovelling offers of free DLC and continuous round-the-clock efforts to patch (at least three a week) until everything is fixed.

I followed the subsequent broo-ha-ha on the forums, fairly entranced, as two very angry groups screamed at each other over the thorny morality of a broken release. Most people were furious, they’d spent money on something that simply didn’t work at all. Something this bust, they argued, should have been flagged up in advance. They wanted refunds, apologies and various levels of retribution on those responsible. I agree, for the record, I just don’t believe this was some super-error on the release day, and everyone would have been a lot more forgiving if the errors were made apparent up front

Oh god the combat behind the title screen looks cool and sexy. It's sadly still sometimes better to watch this than play in-game.

On the other side, a hard core of apologists for the dev team fought hard to stop people asking for their money back. Kerberos has an excellent track history for tech support, they said – pull out now, and the whole game could be left without funds or hope. Sword of the Stars I, something of a classic, had similar problems and was patched over time to be a superb game. Which it is, I’ve played it, detailed, fun, fast and absorbing 4X gameplay, well worth a look. So the team can clearly pull this off, but at the same time, wait, what, they’ve got a track history of releasing broken games? That take months to fix? That’s just inexcusable. Sorry, but it is. Nobody buys broken cars for full price. Nobody releases drugs without testing them. Charging for a broken game is just fundamentally stupid and dishonest, no two ways about it.

That’s more than enough preaching from my soapbox, though. If you want more trollish tales of woe and horror, check out the forums on Steam or elsewhere, they’re very… lively, I guess, is the polite word. Now for the game itself.

Every race has its own ship designs. Hiver ships look like flies. Their freighters are maggots. That says something about commerce, I think.

I’m playing about a month on from that god-awful release, and there have indeed been extensive patches, two to three a week. There are still issues, but this is shaping up incredibly well. However idiotic (or horribly stressed to the point of idiocy, I suppose) they were to let it out broken, the devs are definitely making good on their promises. Free DLC for those who’d pre-ordered, and a continuing raft of changes and bug fixes in operation. Do not, my fellow gamers, give up on this title. Don’t buy it right now, necessarily, but keep an eye on it.

4X gameplay is set on an epic level of space exploration and empire building. You must eXplore, eXpand, eXterminate and, errr… the other one, eXresearch new technologies, something like that, as you guide your nascent race of spacefarers into the dark void. From a tiny clutch of homeworlds, you must conquer an entire galaxy either before your opponents get there first, or before some nameless horror descends from the depths of space to wipe all of you out. Okay, the nameless horrors usually have names, but they’re cool ones. And they’re optional, you don’t need to have them in if you don’t want them. Your campaign is very adjustable to your own preferences.

The detail and scope in SOTS2 is impressive. There’s a huge research tree of hundreds of different options, most of which link to ship and weapon design. Will you go for a trade empire, full of powerful space stations and freighter chains? Or super-fast dreadnoughts, bristling with giant laser beams? Diplomacy or death, which will you deal most of? Your agents can infiltrate enemy empires to steal research or hinder. Your giant broadcast ships can bombard them with propaganda. Enslave worlds with a mind-control virus, or use psychic battlecruisers to drive enemy crews mad. Or make friends with everyone and ally against the galaxy-spanning threats (if you opted for them) later in the game.

This is the auto-resolve screen. It's just as entertaining as it looks.

Ship design is particularly engaging, as you can name not just broad designs but also individual ships, an ability I’ve always wanted to see in Total War games. Once you’ve decked out your new designs with the latest in massive plasma cannons, send them off to raid, invade, scan and build across your growing network of worlds. Each fleet will have an individual admiral, with their own strengths and weaknesses, and what a fleet is capable of depends entirely on what ships are in it. Survey teams to find new worlds, constructor fleets to create defence networks or stellar shopping malls, enormous invasion fleets, carriers with swarms of tiny fighters or larger gunships – the choice is yours. Combat plays out in real time with very shiny graphics, and the potential for enormous tactical cunning and flexibility.

There’s also an impressive choice of different races, six in all, each of which plays very differently thanks to the imaginative differences their space travel works. Militaristic Tarka ships are the most straight-forward, able to fly their living metal ships anywhere at reasonable speeds. The Sol Force humans are generalists, and are stuck with using random, pre-existing node lines between galaxies for fast travel in limited directions. The insectile Hivers creep slowly to new systems, then build teleport gates for instant access later. Travelling flocks of Morrigi traders move faster across space the more of them there are; the whale-like super-technologist Liir-Zuul Alliance are fastest in the freedom of deep space and slower near planets. The horrific Suulka hoard rip their own own node lines using bore ships, carrying them on to devastate new worlds with their parasitic tendencies. Each race comes with different music and sounds, and feels very individual, both in terms of their appearance and what tactics and technologies work best.

Fully 3D, the universe map is where you spend most of your time, so it's lucky it looks pretty amazing.

I played a bit of SOTS 1, late in the day, and very much enjoyed it. It was intuitive and fun, with such a wealth of options that you never had the same game twice. Civilisations is the nearest in terms of gameplay, really, it’s a slow pace with plenty of intrigue as you decide what to build and who to ally with, as well as when to plunge into the inevitable war. SOTS 2 takes itself a bit too seriously compared to the original, which is good in places. Your galaxies are fully-realised gems, studded with gas giants and asteroid belts, often littered with relics or surprise enemies, even tiny civilisations that can be brought into your fold. The attention to realism (crazy space future style) is impressive. But it’s also brought some irritating, if intelligently intended, ideas. Research trees, for example, have a random element. Many new techs need to have a feasibility study done on them before you can even research them fully, and there’s a random chance you can’t get them, or have to risk putting the money in for no results. Personally, I quite like this, it adds to the thought and planning and stops games devolving into a race for the same old game-winners every time. But I can see how it’s annoying. Similarly, the first copy of a new ship you design is an expensive prototype that costs way more than later builds. Fine, very realistic. But annoying if the only change I’ve made to the design is a new set of guns. I’m sure this is being worked on, though, the mechanics are frequently changing as the patches go up.

Combat is disappointing – it feels like you start too far away from enemies, and there’s a lot of flapping about pointlessly in space, looking for things to kill. The title screen shows you the kind of combat you want and expect, all glistening rays and missiles tearing up floating death palaces.  By the time you’ve found someone, there’s usually not enough time left to blow them up, so you end up chipping away at them over several frustrating turns. And the ship AI is hopeless right now. Clicking on an enemy ship tells your boys to shoot at it, but they make no effort to steer or stay near, they only fly to where you told them. You have to micro-manage on an irritating level. Auto-resolve has some very odd path-finding issues going on, so you get a radar display of Benny Hill dots jumbling frenetically around. It’s quite funny, at least. All the re-patching means things are constantly breaking anew – save games particularly – and the diplomacy, trade and general UI still suffer from bugs, placeholders and generally being a bit ropey. Crash to desktop is a regular irritation.

Ships can be fitted out with an amazing variety of guns, sections and abilities. Then sent to die in the cold vastness of space. Heh.

All that said, though, I think this game will live up to its promise. It’s big, clever, detailed and exciting. It also looks great (when it works), glossy and impressive. Give it a couple of months, perhaps, but don’t ignore this one, it is a worthy successor to its (currently cheap and easier to play) original. Once everything works as it should, this will have excellent gameplay and replayability scores, but they let it down at the moment while it’s still being mended. Keep an eye on it, though, this is going places.

Sleep well, little orc. Soon, the world will be ours.

Dungeon Overlord models itself on the venerable and esteemed Dungeon Keeper, a classic management game from back in the day. You are the evil keeper of a foul dungeon, stocking your lair with traps, minions and horrors. Your ultimate goal is to crush all the fluffiness out of the world, replacing happy elves in thatched bungalows with an acid-stained, charred wasteland full of abused goblins wherever possible. It’s the same goal that rises up in my filthy heart whenever I look out of my bedroom window at the local community centre across the road.

The steps on your road to global horrification will be many and frustrating. First, establish your internal economy by mining iron, crystals and gold. Then build a series of rooms to store these resources and attract creatures to your lair. Then train them up and upgrade everything, researching new abilities with the help of warlocks in the library, until your single dungeon is a network of linked catacombs, replete with hordes of wicked beings ready to trash the rest of the world.

An idyllic village. We killed everyone and took their cows.

I’m actually pretty impressed with this. This doesn’t mean I’ve suddenly come round to online social browser games, far from it. The painfully slow progress forces you to play at an extremely casual speed. You really can’t play for more than a couple of minutes before you’re faced with a series of two-hour waits, but that’s fine. Simply queue up the orders you want done, and go and do something else (hint: choose Skyrim). There’s no clear way of winning or losing, other than measuring your progress against friends or the wider online world – not to my taste, but perfectly reasonable. And as my previous incursions into this field have indicated, these games aren’t fond of pushing boundaries. This follows the formula religiously, as all the browser games I’ve ever played do.

Here's my holding at an early stage. The central heating is a little overpowering, but there's a lot of potential here.

However, Dungeon Overlord succeeds in being welcoming to play, amusingly animated and fairly addictive. I’ve got an addictive personality, so I’m easily hooked on things. And gaming is one of the world’s only markets where being addictive is viewed as a positive thing. Cigarettes? Bad. Gambling? Bad. Heroin? Bad. Addictive games? Amazing! Yes please, hook me up and take my social security number! Someone will almost certainly clamp down on this sooner or later, it’s only sensible. Thank goodness that’s not yet.

The graphics are nice – your dungeon is neatly animated, with goblins dashing about fetching and carrying things and other minions wandering around eating and working. The sounds are evocative of underground evil, although you need to turn the music off unless you really really love Halls of the Mountain King from Pier Gynt. And there’s a decent amount of complexity and ‘oo I’ve almost levelled up’ feeling to warrant further investigation.

My main criticism is the waiting times, here. Upgrades and training take start at the sort of 5-10 minute time and rapidly increase to many hours. I suppose that stops it getting too addictive, in that you are forced to go and do something else for a while. And that keeps the game casual, fair enough. But you can skip these restrictions by paying dungeon marks, the purchasable in-game currency, an idiotic waste of anyone’s money. I disapprove quite strongly of this sort of angle in Free to Play games, it’s fundamentally miserable. ‘Here’s some good gameplay, but if you want to get on with it, give us cash,’ it seems to say. Which is fine as a business model, I get that, but very mean-spirited in terms of providing free-to-play fun. I got a free load of marks to review the game, and I very much think I’d have lost interest without the advantage they brought. You do at least slowly earn these marks as you play the game, though, and the tutorial quests merely point out how the system works. As these game go, this one is pleasingly gentle about how often it swipes at your wallet.

Here's a better indication of how it looks in the browser, although you can play fullscreen if you want. You'll see these loading screens a bit too often, the transitions are a bit slow.

Dungeon Keeper was a real favourite of mine back in the day, and this game has all the hall-marks that made that one such a winner. If this could be played as quickly and smoothly as DK, I’d recommend this game wholeheartedly – you could have your dungeons rise and fall much more rapidly, sometimes winning, sometimes getting wiped out. I know that’s not the aim here, though, this is effectively the same game as the ‘build your farm’ types, just with a vicious fantasy streak to it.

But the gameplay is fun enough to be worth a look. I get the same delight from having my orcs pillage a settlement as I used to in DK. I’ve been cheerily tuning back in over the last week to keep my dungeon ticking over, and I can’t see why anyone else wouldn’t enjoy doing the same.

You have been banished to this underworld, never to see the light of day. While the surface continues to suffer under the iron fist of Emperor Hawthorne, you will enter into a battle for survival in Avernum, a hungry and fragile nation deep in the underworld. The people of this world have not given up, however, and they are forging a new nation of their own with steel, magic, and dreams of returning to the sun. Join them, explore a huge game world, hunt for hundreds of magical artifacts, choose from hundreds of quests, and become the hero of the underworld!

Originally known as Exile: Escape From the Pit and released in 1995, this remastered version of Avernum: Escape from the Pit will contain immense overhauls to the system, graphics, compatibility, and interface of the indie classic. The entire award winning series will be redone from the ground up and make its debut on Macintosh in December, 2011 and iPad  and Windows in April, 2012.  More information is available at http://www.avernum.com/avernum/index.html

ABOUT SPIDERWEB SOFTWARE

Spiderweb Software, Inc., an independent game-design company based in Seattle, WA, is fanatically dedicated to creating fun, exciting fantasy role-playing games for Windows, Macintosh, and the iPad. Past titles include the award-winning Exile, Geneforge, Avernum and Avadon series. More information on the company is available at www.spiderwebsoftware.com.

That’s really what this game is all about – it’s a platformer where you have the ability to turn reality inside out in order to help you get to the end of the level. You can do this at appropriately named ‘eversion points’ which can be found at multiple places in each level. Each eversion point lets you switch between two specific layers of the world, with deeper layers becoming accessible as you progress through the game. Each layer of the world has different environmental effects – for example, clouds are immaterial in the first layer but become solid in the second. But apart from this interesting feature, Eversion plays much like Mario: run around, jump on enemies to kill them, collect coins (gems, actually), rescue the princess…

That’s right, you get to rescue a princess in this game! Since I’ve said pretty much all I can about the gameplay, I figure I may as well tell you about the plot now. Said plot can be condensed into one sentence – your princess has been kidnapped and you need to rescue her. That’s all there is to it. To elaborate, you play the role of a cute flower-like critter named Zee Tee romping around in a cute world and trying to rescue the Princess of the Flower Kingdom, who was kidnapped by the Ghulibas of the north (presumably the enemies you kill in droves during the game). There’s nothing more, nothing more at all! _{She’s lying! There’s much, much more! Don’t save the princess! Don’t save her!}

As for everything else… There are two versions – the freeware one you can download straight from the Zaratustra website, and the HD version you can get for about 4.99 USD on Steam. The graphics vary from retro (for the freeware version) and somewhat better (the HD version, obviously). The music, I think, is the same for both versions, but I can’t be sure because I haven’t actually got the HD one. There are multiple endings to unlock, and an extra ending is included in the HD version. The only thing you really need to watch out for with this game is that sometimes, you need practically pixel perfect accuracy to get some of the jumps right. _{She’s lying! There’s more! Be cautious in World 4!}

All in all, this is a game worth checking out – it’s really short if you don’t go for 100% completion. Get the free version here: http://zarat.us/tra/offline-games/eversion.html

Oh, and by the way… the disclaimer at the start of the game is a lie. It’s a really cute, sweet game; it won’t drive you insane or anything. _{She’s lying! The disclaimer’s true! This game is not good for your sanity: it was inspired by Lovecraft!}

Seeeee? Cute. Not insanity-inducing at all.