Defenders Quest

Defender's Quest opens on a rather bleak note. After falling victim to a ravenous plague, you're tossed into the Great Pit even before you've drawn your last breath, but you somehow recover and discover within yourself the ability to travel to the world between life and death. Unfortunately, that brings you into contact with the zombie-like Revenants, who prey on the living and cannot be stopped from within the mortal realm. In spite of the dark subject matter, it's actually a rather funny game, particularly in moments involving the first barbarian you meet, who's handy in a fight but more than a little bit crazy.

The "towers" in this tower defense game are actually the characters in your party, which can grow into a small army in relatively short order. Like other such games, different types of units - which is to say, different classes of characters - have different abilities: berserkers can deal out tremendous amounts of short-range melee damage, rangers fire arrows from long distances, healers do their best to keep everyone in the fight, and so forth. You place your compatriots along the paths of the incoming enemies and then hope they've got what it takes to cut down the attackers before they get to you.

                                      

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Police Force 2

It’s not often enough that games based on emergency services are released, there’s little out there, surprising when you consider they’re everything young kids want to be. Police Force 2 is the pseudo simulator-cum-action title that sticks you in the shoes of a humble police officer out on the beat, the question is, is it really as much fun as you think?

When you're ready to hit the streets you'll start your first shift, each is randomly generated from a selection of different jobs that can generally be finished in around 5-10 minutes, allowing you the rest of your 30 minute shift answering emergency calls and generally policing your district and keeping your populace safe. Shifts will range from anything like catching speeders, busting smugglers and photographing drug dealers, they aren’t generally too exciting; however this is where emergency calls come in.

To break up the monotony of daily life you've got emergency calls, in a shift you’ll be tasked with as many as humanly possible, their spontaneity does add greatly to the game, but they also come at a price. If you may have a particularly tasking job on your shift, such as locating a number of pushers which can be tricky to track down especially during a night shift and the last thing you want is for emergency calls to crop up every couple of minutes. However, if it weren’t for emergency calls you wouldn’t get to respond to shops getting held up at gunpoint, stolen handbags or drunken homeless fights.

                                       

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Behold Studios Knights of Pen and Paper

Knights Of Pen And Paper isn’t a turn-based RPG: it’s a postmodern deconstruction of a turn-based RPG. The joke is that you’re not actually controlling a band of brave, noble adventurers – you’re controlling a group of friends sallying forth on a brave and noble Dungeons and Dragons-style pen and paper adventure. More than mere narrative dressing, the joke spills over into the mechanics.

You don’t just pick classes at the outset of Pen And Paper: you pick the real life character who’s going to fill each role. Grandma, it turns out, with her screeching, aggro-ing voice, makes for an excellent paladin.

Since you also partially control the DM, you construct your own difficulty curve, fashioning basic quests out of a limited set of ingredients and then populating the battles with as many enemies as you think you can handle. This should make things simple, but it’s surprisingly easy to get cocky and chuck an elite snake in the mix that you weren’t actually prepared for.

The turn-based system at Knights Of Pen And Paper’s heart is built from familiar pieces – classes behave as you’d expect, with rogues and mages hitting hard but needing warriors and paladins to soak up damage for them, while support classes like Druids and Priests keep everyone’s HP and MP topped up between special attacks. The main quest’s predefined battles do throw up enemy combinations that require more complex tactics, but there’s no denying that, having breached the fourth wall, Behold Studios’ charming game is content to head back inside the building.

                          

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Survivor Squad

Endless Loop Studios’ latest title doesn’t do much to enhance the zombie survival genre, and what it does present is plagued by game-ruining glitches and bugs, putting a damper on the whole experience. When a mechanic or gameplay element does work the way it should, it holds promise, but unfortunately, too much of the game doesn’t deliver enough to make this a title worth paying attention to.

Survivor Squad is essentially an RTS action game that requires players to control a team of up to four humans as they battle their way through buildings, killing hordes of infected and looting for supplies along the way. The cliche story has you and your team heading down a seemingly endless string of repetitive environments in a quest to find a scientist that has a cure, but if you’re playing this game for the narrative, you’re already off to a bad start.

You control each member of your squad in one of three ways: You can hit a corresponding number on your keyboard, left-click, or drag your mouse to form a box to encompass the character or characters to want to control. Then, by right-clicking on the map, your squad moves until they reach their destination. By holding the right mouse button down and then sliding the mouse in a direction, your selected survivors will face exactly what you tell them to. By having your squad members face different ways, each teammate can cover each others’ backs, increasing your units’ chances of survival.

                                             

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Gunpoint Special Edition 2013

Gunpoint is a prime example of a small, relatively simple game that that exudes sheer elegance. Every aspect of its clever design, laugh-out-loud noir story, tiny but expressive art, and moody music work harmoniously with one another towards creating a truly unique 2D puzzle platforming experience. Nothing feels out of place, there’s little fat needed to be trimmed. Both the act of movement and its inventive take on hacking work wonderfully throughout the entire three-hour campaign of comedic industrial espionage and murder mystery.After acquiring a pair of futuristic trousers, your private eye protagonist gains the ability to hop across the world as he sees fit. 

Early on in the 11-mission campaign, you gain the ability to flip to a silhouetted view and reroute the circuits of any building, which allows you to create environmental “if-then” equations that help you navigate various security systems. For example, you can link a security camera to a light, then reroute a nearby light switch so that flicking it causes a nearby door to swing open. With this in place, you can step in front of the camera to activate it, which causes the light to go off, which causes a guard in that darkened room try to turn them back on by flicking the light switch, which instead knocks him unconscious as the door flies open. It's supremely satisfying to see the dominos fall exactly as planned.

                                              

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Gunpoint

Gunpoint is a prime example of a small, relatively simple game that that exudes sheer elegance. Every aspect of its clever design, laugh-out-loud noir story, tiny but expressive art, and moody music work harmoniously with one another towards creating a truly unique 2D puzzle platforming experience. Nothing feels out of place, there’s little fat needed to be trimmed. Both the act of movement and its inventive take on hacking work wonderfully throughout the entire three-hour campaign of comedic industrial espionage and murder mystery.After acquiring a pair of futuristic trousers, your private eye protagonist gains the ability to hop across the world as he sees fit. 

Early on in the 11-mission campaign, you gain the ability to flip to a silhouetted view and reroute the circuits of any building, which allows you to create environmental “if-then” equations that help you navigate various security systems. For example, you can link a security camera to a light, then reroute a nearby light switch so that flicking it causes a nearby door to swing open. With this in place, you can step in front of the camera to activate it, which causes the light to go off, which causes a guard in that darkened room try to turn them back on by flicking the light switch, which instead knocks him unconscious as the door flies open. It's supremely satisfying to see the dominos fall exactly as planned.

                                              

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Towns Game

The civilians will trap themselves in pits. They will work to starvation. They will get stuck in suicide chains where one dies to a monster, so another feels compelled to go gather their bones, and then they die, and so on. Of course, this is a feature, not a bug: The challenge in games of this genre is to learn the citizens' default behaviors and modify it. You set the highest priorities to gathering and producing food. You tell them that you don't want any more bones, and you give them weapons and armor so they stop dying quite so much. You tweak zones, production schedules, and task priorities to keep everyone happy and healthy.

For example, a standard start-up sequence in Towns goes like this: Do some logging, create a zone for carpentry, build a carpenters' table and a wood detailer. Then mine some stone, and make a masonry area, and then make a mason's bench. Then till some fields, gather some wheat, and plant it. Then make a bakery, equipped with a mill, an oven, and a bakers table. Then you take wheat to the mill, which produces flour, which you then bake into bread, which your civilians can now eat.

                                               

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Nancy Drew Ghost of Thornton Hall

It’s the middle of the night, and the sound of your phone ringing shatters the silence. Do you answer? If you’re Nancy Drew, then of course you do! In Ghost of Thornton Hall, Nancy’s 28th adventure, that midnight call takes her to the sticky American subtropics of an island off the coast of Georgia. There she’s asked to look into the case of a missing girl, but in doing so she’ll have to contend with the legend of a ghost haunting a rundown mansion. Despite the eerie locale and a fascinating family history, you won’t find too many scares in and around Thornton Hall, and you may find the rambling story difficult to follow, but anyone up for another mystery with the popular teen sleuth will be in for a fairly fun time exploring this dilapidated southern house and solving its bountiful puzzles.

The late-night caller is Savannah Woodham, a paranormal investigator Nancy met in a previous outing, Shadow at the Water's Edge. She’s a firm believer in ghosts, including the reported ghost of Charlotte Thornton, who died tragically when she was 21. But this newest case from the same family, involving a missing bride-to-be Jesslyn Thornton, requires someone who doesn’t believe in ghosts, a skeptic like Nancy.

                                      

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Virtual Families 2 Our Dream House

Last Days of Work loves virtual Sims. I mean seriously loves them, at least according to their lead designer. And, well, their product line, which includes the massively popular Virtual Villagers series. For those of us who love messing with the lives of little virtual people without all that faffing about on an island, Last Day of Work created  Virtual Families, a game that features all the animated people without all the exploding volcanoes. Now they've come out with a sequel to that fabulous game, Virtual Families 2: Our Dream House, which deepens the gameplay of the original in new and interesting ways!

Virtual Families 2 begins, as many families do, with a single person and a place to live. Once you've chosen a character to start things with, your next goal is to get them working, marry them off, encourage a few children to spring along, and help take care of the wreck of a place the family calls home. 

                              

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UnEpic 2013

UnEpic is the product of what is pretty much a one-man operation; Francisco Téllez de Meneses is the sole person behind the concept, design, programming, story and dialogue and even the soundtrack for the game. According to the author, the game's biggest source of inspiration was The Maze of Galious.

Daniel, the protagonist, is having a Dungeons & Dragons session at a friend's house when the beer kicks in and he needs to go to the bathroom. There, the lights go out and none of his friends reply to him. All is silent and when he turns on his Zippo lighter, he suddenly finds himself in and old medieval castle, filled with enemies and traps. Equipped with his wits, quirky remarks and all the loot he can find, Daniel sets out to explore the castle's 200 rooms and find out just what exactly is going on...

Assigning ability points to any of the weapon types in the game will make you more proficient with them, namely by automatically increasing your normal damage and your critical hit chances and consequent damage with that given weapon class.

                                             

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Train Simulator 2013 Deluxe

Just about every little boy gets a kick out of trains. Whether it's a model railway or a ride on an historic steam locomotive, there's something about trains that satisfy the desire for power and speed.

For new players, TS2013 is a great time to don your driver's uniform as the interface has had a major overhaul to make the a lot more user-friendly than before.

When you load the game, you'll see the new Collection screen, which provides a nice overview of the routes and locomotives you own. Routes have a green bar across the bottom, with locos having a blue bar.

Thanks to better integration with Steam, you'll also see related DLC (downloadable content) so you can click on a route or engine to open the Steam interface and by the extras.

For the standard version of TS2013, you get the excellent modern London to Brighton route, complete with the new Class 377 Electrostar trains. There's also the popular Isle of Wight route, and two US routes: Sherman Hill and Northeast Corridor. For an extra £10, the forthcoming Deluxe Edition also comes with the brand new Munich-Augsburg route, and the ICE 3 train.

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