Thank you Gamers Gate for giving us this game to review.

A disease has spread that turns people into zombies. Unless you've been living under a rock for the past few years, you know that zombies - have rotting flesh - eat brains - will attack any human that isn't a zombie.   Your name is Ben Riley and your goal is to locate survivors, food, medical supplies and ammunition from the deserted town. You must gather everyone and everything into your fort and defend it from the zombie apocalypse.

The concept here is rather unique; it’s a survival horror game with RPG elements When you start the game you must choose a profession for Ben.  This profession will determine his base stats which include Smarts, Power, Speed, Finesse and Toughness.    The realism also makes this game unique.   You won’t start off as a sharp shooter and will often miss your target.  You’re also not an Olympian and will tire out and have to stop and catch your breath.

In this game you’re running against the clock.  With each new day, you’ll discover food and weapon stashes and locations of survivors.    It takes time to get to these areas and you usually won’t have enough time to complete all the missions before nightfall.  You can still do missions at night, but there’s a lot more zombies and it’s best to conserve your ammo.  It’s too hard to come by.

If you rescue people, they can join your party and help you scavenge loot and attack zombies.  Your party also has various skill sets, make sure to utilize them!  If a party member is wounded you can leave them at the fort to heal and build up the defenses.  The fort is the only place you can save, I wish there was a quick save option.

If a party member dies or you don’t have enough food, the morale will drop.  If the morale drops too low, some people may leave your party.  One thing I learned the hard way is that if you leave a party member behind, there is no way to get them back.  Make sure everyone is with you before you go into an extraction point.

The artificial intelligence is lacking in this game.  It’s way too easy to lose a party member behind a car or a fence.  They are smart enough to switch weapons when they run out of ammo.  I didn’t expect the zombies to be that bright but the party AI is frustrating.

My biggest complaint is the camera controls.  This game is in a third person view and you have to constantly correct the camera angling.  You get used to it after a while but it’s still very clunky.

The artificial intelligence is another aspect lacking in this game. It’s way too easy to lose a party member behind a car or a fence. Luckily they are smart enough to switch weapons when they run out of ammo or things would be a total wash. I didn’t expect the zombies to be that bright but the party AI can be really frustrating.

My biggest complaint is the camera controls. This game is in a third person view and you have to constantly correct the camera angling. You get used to it somewhat after a while but it’s still very clunky and very unforgivable. Perhaps they'll put in a patch that fixes this.

The physics can go a little over the top at times with bodies bouncing around like ping-pong balls, but that's what ragdolls are for aren't they? The graphics are outdated and the textures are not very sharp. The zombie models are recycled to town and back, but they do have unique attacks and personalities. The model animations are a bit strange at times. Sometimes instead of walking the NPC’s slide like they’re on escalators. When your character Ben takes damage his body distorts into rather unnatural and impossible positions.

The main menu has music but the game itself is relatively quiet. There is no background music and the sound effects are sparse. It does add to the realism - all you hear are the gruesome growls and screams of the zombies and the loud, staccato reports of automatic weapons. Occasionally people will make comments, but most of those pop up on screen in text.

I haven’t run into any stability issues but I didn’t start playing until version 1.07 was released. The patches released have offered stability fixes and new weapons. Speaking of weapons, you’ll get to use guns, swords, axes, bats, crowbars, shovels and more.

With zombies, come weapons. With weapons comes violence. This game is about as violent as you might expect of a game titled Fort Zombie.   With every hit you’ll see blood splatter, limbs fall off and blood puddles.  The zombies are grotesque looking and often displaying their internal organs.  Other than violence, you’ll see some swearing in the text and manual for the game.  Lastly, some posters on the wall show cleavage.

Fort Zombie retails for ten dollars and I’ve seen it as low as five dollars.  I was disappointed by this game, I thought the concept was good but the execution is poor.  The game play is too mundane and the AI and camera controls make it a chore to play.  I couldn’t find an ESRB Rating for this game but I think it would qualify for an M rating.  I don’t recommend playing it in front of kids, they won’t hear much, but there are plenty of blood and guts on display.

Thank you Chronic Logic for giving us this game to review.

AstroDriller 3020 takes place in the year 3020 and there’s lots of money to be made in collecting gems from outer space. The drillers drill out chunks of coloured rocks and your job is to use laser beams to grind them down while guiding them to the vacuum tube of the same colour. The rocks are worth more or less depending on how much you grind them.

To progress to the next level you have to accumulate a certain number of points. The number of points you get will determine your ranking for that level. Available rankings are, from highest to lowest: platinum, gold, silver and bronze. Depending on your rank, you may also earn upgrade points. Additionally, if you didn't get a very high rank on a level, you can go back and replay it to improve your score without any penalties.

The number of points you get will determine your ranking for that level. Available rankings are, from highest to lowest: platinum, gold, silver, and bronze. Depending on your rank, you may also earn upgrade points. Additionally, if you didn't get a very high rank on a level, you can go back and replay it to improve your score without any penalties.

You can spend your upgrade points at the store to give yourself advantages such as increased critical points, faster grinding rates, longer laser duration, more and longer laser beams and so on. The upgrade costs vary and you can only upgrade things a certain number of times. With upgraded gear you can replay earlier levels to get a much better score.

The level difficulty increases at a reasonable rate. At first you only have to worry about sorting out one color. Later you’ll have multiple colors and multiple astronauts grinding and chucking asteroids your way. To make matters worse, later in the game the vacuum tubes will no longer be stationary and will be at different angles.

Fortunately, the astronauts turn the color of the stone they are grinding, thus giving you a heads up to what’s coming your way. There are asteroids and little stars floating through your area of space, and if you angle your rocks to collide with them you get more points.

There’s a lot of strategy involved in this game. Not only is it difficult to track and sort the different asteroids, but you have to guide them without blocking or losing all the other asteroids floating around. Many levels go beyond just putting the rocks into the vacuum tube. For instance, in order to pass some levels you have to hit certain stars for extra points.

The sound effects are nice and spacey and the background music is very pleasant. The astronauts will praise you when you do well and taunt you when you mess up. They don't curse at you but they will tell you that you suck. Of note: when I installed this game on my laptop I didn’t have sound at all. The technical support was very good and they suggested I download the latest OpenAL drivers, which solved my problem.

Graphically this game won’t blow you away, but it has some eye candy and it'll run well even on weak computers like netbooks. The lasers are pink and shiny and when you grind away all the stone, the gems look pretty too. The particle effects look good and the physics work really well with this game. The interface is pretty straight forward and easy to use.

For $10 this is a good buy for fans of puzzle games, even though it is rather short. Once you beat all ninety levels, you can go back and improve upon your score and max out your upgrades. However, if you are not a perfectionist, plan on being entertained for only a few hours.  There is a free demo and this game is available on PC and Mac systems. Other than the taunts, this is a clean game that both kids and adults can enjoy.

Tremulous is a free, open source, online first person shooter. It began in 2000 as a mod for Quake 3. In 2005, it was developed as an open source stand alone game. By being open source, anyone can use the code to contribute or use for their own purposes. The latest version as of this review is beta 1.2 which was released in December of 2009. Tremulous is powered by the Quake 3 engine and unlike many betas, I have not run into any bugs or glitches. 

There’s no fancy back story or anything to pull at your heart strings; just two teams, humans versus aliens. Each team must build up their base and destroy the opponent’s base. Each side has an offensive class and a defensive class and they have their own unique abilities and upgrade paths.

Upgrades are purchased by the number of kills.  As a team accumulates kills, it allows the humans to upgrade their armor and weapons and the aliens can evolve into tougher warriors.  Builders get points for every two minutes they stay alive.

The alien base is managed by the Overmind which is essential for running and building all of the structures.  Eggs are the spawn point used by the aliens and if there are plenty of eggs, there won’t be a delay in respawning.  There are various protective structures such as barricades, trappers, acid tubes, and boosters that enhance the poison attack of aliens.

Humans must guard their reactor which powers all of their machinery.  The telenodes are used for respawning; again it’s good to be redundant with these.  To protect the base you can install machine gun turrets and Tesla generators.  The Tesla generators will attack any target so you have to set up a defense computer if you want it to attack aliens only.  Armories are essential to upgrade the weapons and the med stations will heal wounded soldiers.  Aliens have the advantage of slowly recovering health on their own.

When it comes to attacking the aliens have melee, poison attacks and the ability to climb and jump off the walls.  The humans get cool weapons like grenades, flame throwers, chain guns, shot guns, and the most devastating of all, the Lucifer Cannon.  The guns require ammo and battery packs and take some time to recharge.  A soldier can wear a battery pack to increase an energy weapon’s charge by 50%.  There’s a jet pack that allows a soldier to fly but they can’t wear a battery pack at the same time.

The game play is pretty fast paced and attacking the enemy base is best done in waves.   If the Overmind or Reactor is destroyed the spawn points will still work but new ones cannot be created.  So to truly win you’ll have to destroy the Overmind, Reactor along with all the telenodes and eggs.  Fortunautely the servers are well populated and it’s easy to find a server with ten or more people on it.

Graphically, well, this game only takes up 125 megabytes and it's the Quake 3 engine, so don't expect Crysis-level prettiness.  It's not that bad though.  At first the aliens look like big spiders(which are easier to stomp) but they do get more intimidating as they evolve.  The humans all look alike, though you can make yourself look a little different if you upgrade your armor.  As a human you see your hand holding the gun like most FPSs, but if you're playing as an alien you don't see any of your limbs.

I mainly just played on the default map; there are other maps available but you often have to download them at 4KB/sec.  Luckily they aren't very big, or it could take hours.  My heart goes out to those who are still bound by 56K modems.

The background music is ambient and not very memorable, but thankfully the sound effects and voice acting for the aliens and humans are a little better.  The aliens sound like the Strogg from Quake Wars.  The guns sound like guns, and the alien screeches and squeals definitely sound like... aliens, so they did a good job with the sounds.

With guns and bloodthirsty aliens, comes violence, blood, and gore.  There isn’t a lot of blood and gore flying when the bullets are, but some maps have blood puddles on the floor.  If you're playing on the alien team and you are being shot at there will be a green haze around the screen.  Like many online games, some people will send messages laced with cuss words.  We can only hope that some day the median age of the online gaming crowd rises above twenty-five.

Tremulous is pretty tame when it comes to violence if you compare it to many FPS games out these days.  Granted it can’t keep up with the graphics of modern titles, but the price is right and this will run well on slow computers and internet connections.  It can also run on Linux and Mac OS too.  If you liked Quake 3 or Natural Selection, give it a try, it's only 125MB!

Those of you who have played Dragon Warrior/Quest games will remember that the slimes are the weakest enemies that you encounter in the series. This is the story of a slime named Rocket who saves his village of Boingburg from the evil plob. The story is pretty simple: Rocket and his friends were playing in the palace garden when they stumbled upon the Warrior Flute. They blew on it, which alerted the plob (mob, get it?) of its location and so the plob kidnapped all the inhabitants of the town and decimated it. Armed only with the broken flute, Rocket must now rescue all one hundred villagers and stop the plob.

After the opening story, you can explore what’s left of your town and chat with the few inhabitants that remain. The church is where you go to save your progress. The story unfolds as you explore the different areas of Slimenia. Each area has a set number of slimes that need to be found and rescued and there’s a boss creature that must be defeated before you can reach the next area. As you rescue slimes you’ll gain access to new areas of the town including a store, museum, and the library.

Although Rocket is just slime, he's more of a threat than he might first appear. He can carry up to three objects at a time, but if he's fully loaded and you find something else you want to carry there are train carts scattered around that you can unload your findings into and send them off to town. In this game you’ll want to collect everything you find. And I mean everything. Monsters, empty treasure chests, boomerangs, arrows, fruit and anything else you can grab. The items you collect can be used for ammo, or you can combine them into more powerful objects using alchemy. 

Rocket only has one attack move: the elastoblast. He stretches like a rubber band and flings himself at enemies and objects. If an object is flung into the air, Rocket can carry it if he catches it before it hits the ground. If Rocket is hit by an enemy, all the objects he’s carrying are dropped. Rocket starts off with three life hearts but throughout the game you’ll be awarded some and can find others hidden in the town if you carefully explore your surroundings.

Rocket’s true power lies within the Schleiman Tank which can be summoned by blowing the repaired Warrior Flute. At first you’ll be in charge of collecting and firing the ammo alone. But later, you’ll be able to recruit friends to help you in the battles. Your friends have specific skills like healing the crew, healing the tank, stealing ammo from the enemy, sabotaging the enemy ship, or manning the cannons.

The tank battles are a huge part of this game, and choosing the right kind of ammo is a huge part of winning the battles. You can pick and choose your own ammo or take the advice of your helper. In town, you can create upgrades that boost your tank's hitpoints. Sometimes they only cost gold but most of the time, specific objects will be required to upgrade the tank.
The multiplayer in this game comes in two modes: tank battle and surfing. In surfing mode you have to collect as many coins as possible before the time runs out. Both of these modes can be played using only one game cartridge.

After you beat the game's singleplayer campaign you can keep playing, whether you want to finish collecting monsters, complete some more side quests, or collect extra-powerful ammo for your tank.

Graphically this game is pretty typical for a Dragon Quest game. Sprites, smiles, and vivid colors. The town and its surrounding areas are very bright and colorful. The enemies are all very unique, including their animations and behaviors. The living statues are quite spooky.

The enemies have their own unique voices, noises and sound effects too. The music is very pleasant and Dragon-Questy. I was somewhat annoyed that the enemy theme music had an odd loop featuring a person saying/singing “Boom Chicca Pow!”. 

When it comes to appropriateness issues... where to start. The slimes are not the atheistic globs of muck you might think, as they all worship a goddess of some sort. Holy water and goddess statues are two kinds of ammunition you can use in your tank. The church in town has some catholic references, including a "Mother Gloopierior". The other thing worth mentioning is that the plob father, Don Clawleone, smokes a cigar in a cut scene. The violence in this game is very cartoony and most of it is directed toward enemy tanks. 

This is an older game so the price is relatively low on Amazon, but it may be hard to find at local retail stores. If you or your kids have a DS and enjoy Dragon Quest games I highly recommend this title, but keep the moral warnings in mind if you plan to buy it.

Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story is the third entry in the Mario and Luigi Series following Super Star Saga and Partners In Time. In this game you get to play as Mario, Luigi and Bowser. The story begins with many toads in mushroom kingdom becoming obese after eating a strange mushroom. This sickness is called "The Blorbs". The Princess and Starlow ask for Mario and Luigi's help in finding a cure. Their meeting at the town hall is quickly interrupted by Bowser who is upset because he was not invited to the summit. Bowser too has eaten a strange mushroom and uses his ability to vacuum suck everyone in Princess Peach's castle into his belly. Hence the title Bowser's Inside Story.

Fawful returns in this game and is behind the mysterious mushrooms. His funny attempts at english return with quotes like this "Beef? I am lacking in beef. Fawful is beefless." He wants to rule the world and wants to awaken the dark star to give him the power to do so. Fawful will need Princess Peach to restore the dark star's power. It's up to Mario and Luigi to locate Princess Peach inside of Bowser and to keep her safe. In order to stop the dark star, three star fragments have to be acquired from sages around mushroom kingdom. Bowser and the Mario Brothers are both after these pieces and they will be working together for them. Bowser is not aware that his arch enemies are inside of him keeping him alive and restoring his powers.

When you play as Bowser you'll only have the ability to punch things. Later in the game you'll get your fire breathing restored and learn how to do a shell stomp or roll around like a spiky ball. Many areas in the map are only accessible by using these skills. For example you'll have to smash boulders and burn down trees to expose new paths to travel on. As Bowser explores, he'll find some of his minions trapped in cages, if he rescues them, they will give him a new attack move. You can press select at any time to bring up a map which will show you were the store kiosks and save blocks are. Bowser and the Mario Brothers have to shop at different stores when it comes to healing items and gear to wear. The Block guy who runs the store that Bowser shops at can't stand Mario and Luigi for all of the cruel hitting they do to blocks they encounter. 

The Mario brothers start off with basic hammer and jump attacks. Later they will acquire the ability to hammer each other to make themselves smaller and the ability to tunnel underground. As they explore they will encounter puzzle pieces, and by collecting all ten pieces they will learn a special attack move. These attacks are very powerful but often challenging to complete perfectly. Fortunately you can practice the moves anytime in the menu if you need a refresher. Many of the same moves are back including the koopa shell and fire flower attacks. Most of the moves are original and are very powerful and worth your time to learn how to execute them perfectly. To use the moves you have you must have enough Special Power points. These points, including Bowser's, can be restored by drinking syrup.

There are various attributes in this game. They go up with every level you raise and there is an option to randomly increase one attribute per level. The attributes are:

• HP- Hit points/health
• SP- Special Power Points
• Power- how powerful your attacks are.
• Defense- how strong your defense is.
• Speed- how fast your character is. With high speed, your characters should be able to attack first
• Stache/Luck- Your Luck stat. The higher it is, the better chances you have of getting critical hits. Stores give you discounts if your Stache level is high.

Thank you GamersGate for giving us this game to review!

Max drew a monster with his magic marker and his creation came to life. Max must now catch up to him and defeat him. Armed only with his magic marker, Max must solve many puzzles blocking his way.

Like many platformer games there are ledges to jump on and pits to jump over. What sets this game apart is that you can use the magic marker to draw objects to help you get past the obstacles blocking your path. The objects you draw will not come to life but will obey the laws of physics. For example if there’s a wide gap, you can draw a floor over it and walk across. If the cliff is too high, you can draw stairs to get up to it.

In order for your marker to work, you have to collect ink balls to fill it. When you’re done with a drawing you can right click on it again to get your ink back. There are other collectible balls that will allow you to unlock new features in the game. There are achievements for completing levels before a set time but there are no penalties to being thorough and taking as much time as you need.

The levels have checkpoints which is where you will re-spawn if you meet your demise. Typically your nemesis empties your marker for you at each checkpoint. Unfortunately, this is unavoidable and there isn’t anything you can do about it, except to collect more ink balls. One handy feature in this game is that you can freeze time by pressing the space bar. You can draw while time is standing still and this can often save your life.

Do you like space combat? Does the thought of piloting a spaceship through the cosmos, mining and fighting and trading and exploring the stars appeal to you? Do you love to dig your teeth into the intricacies of a simulator with a Newtonian physics system ?

If the answer is no, then this game is not for you. Don't buy it. But if your ears perked up and you thought "Heck yes!", keep reading!

Evochron Mercenary is the tenth or twentieth in a long line of freeform space games, but it is hardly suffering from a bad case of sequelitis. This game is literally the equivalent of a Ford Mustang that has had its V8 engine replaced with a nuclear reactor.

Quick rundown on the whole series: Evochron is a large section of space between the Sol sector - where our solar system is located - and the Vonari sector - where the aliens are located. It is divided up into several dozen sectors, all connected with jumpgates. Each sector, while different in its own way, generally has a few planets, a few moons, a star, some stations, some asteroids - big and little, a big bubbly nebula here and there, and perhaps a black hole; which some pilots refer to as "The Vaccum of Death".

Evochron is populated by several different factions. The Alliance, the Federation, the Richton Clans, and the Vonari. They "own" different sectors. The Alliance are the good guys. If the Alliance control a sector, you're usually safe there. They keep the pirates and space scum under wraps and the Vonari out of the rest of Evochron. If you fly into a Federation or Richton system, you're going to run into dozens of other pilots who want to kill you. And if you fly into a Vonari sector, heaven help you. True, they just want to kill you like most of the humans, but the Vonari can't be bribed or threatened into submission, the loot in their cargo bays is subpar, and most importantly. They never. Stop. Coming.

The Vonari are murderous aliens that look like wolves, according to the Alliance. Allegedly they were the result of genetic tampering thousands of years ago by foolish human scientists. Whatever the case may be, they have some of the most high-tech ships and weapons in the universe and they are trying to exterminate all of humanity.

The core gameplay involves flying around making money while admiring the scenery and trying not to get killed. How do you do this? Well, not getting killed is going to involve a lot of luck and some flying skills on your part, but making money is a lot easier. You can use a tractor beam to mine valuable stuff from just about anything solid floating through Evochron, including other ships - though you have to blow up the ships first. Unless you're terrorizing not-so-helpless miners, mining is one of the easiest ways to make money, but it can also get pretty boring unless you have a hobby like photography and bring along a camera.

More exciting wealth-creating schemes include racing other pilots(if you kill them you lose the race), spying on the big capital ships(better find a stealth generator first), trading guns and missiles and precious metals between various planets(dangerous unless you have the right equipment), and just generally shooting up a boatload of enemy spaceships. The last is the most exciting, but please, whatever you do, don't just jump in your ship and fly off to Space Pirate Central(also known as Cerulean). You will get killed. Over and over.

You start out in the Sapphire system. If you're new to the game, stay right where you are until you've learned how to fly your ship. Once you can fly it without banging into other pilots every five minutes, don't make any travel plans. Upgrade your ship and weapons and then start attacking friendly pilots in Sapphire. Take them on one at a time, because combat gets a lot harder when you have more than one opponent. Don't just fly up and shoot missiles at them either. Read the combat section in the manual and the strategy guide. If you use your cannons and lasers properly you can destroy ships very quickly, and you'll have to be good at it to survive in Evochron. There are ways to avoid enemies, you can fly around cloaked or put up a space shield, but combat is really fun when you get the hang of it, so you're missing out on a large part of the game if you always run and hide.

People often complained that the previous games were too complicated and didn't explain various things very well. The tutorial has been updated and expanded tremendously. If it can't get you up and running pretty quickly this time around, this probably ain't the game for you.

Pro tip: There's a time limit on the demo, but you can fly around for an unlimited amount of time in tutorial mode.

Okay, so that's what the games are like. But how's Evochron Mercenary different?It's prettier. A lot prettier. Take a look:

Lastly, there's more ship equipment, more weapons, new weapons, more ships, new planets(gas giants!), new nebulas(they're prettier!), a new music system(with real music! And it sounds really good too!) and so much more than I have space to list here. If you want a rundown on that you can check it out on the Evochron website. This is a review, not an advertisement.

On that note, how is the game? It's awesome. I had a few issues with the earlier games myself. Combat was awesome, but the weapons were very short-ranged and the missiles were expensive and hard to find. Enemy ships had a tendency to warp in like crazy and fire thousands of missiles at your ship without the local Navy blinking an eye(they even helped).
Lest I forget, the collision model would make me get stuck on objects and leave my ship banging around helplessly like a baby goat in a giant hamster ball.

Evochron Mercenary fixes all of these issues and adds on a layer of spit and polish so shiny it makes my eyes hurt. It's space combat perfection. The controls, the combat, the music, the graphics, the ships, the weapons, the asteroids, the planets, the stations, the nebulas, and of course the Vonari, they're all awesome. 

Lastly, how's the game on the appropriateness scale? No swearing, no blood and gore, no gratuitous nudity - the only violence occurs when you shoot other spaceships with a laser cannon and they explode in a ball of fire(a very pretty ball of fire). It's a very clean game, so aside from the space fights, there's nothing here to raise any eyebrows. No space prostitutes, no brothels on the planets, no foul-mouthed pirates.

Flatspace II is a space trading game. It's the usual story: lone pilot with little ship and some guns and missiles takes on massively hostile universe while trading cargo, bounty hunting, attacking weaker ships, performing missions or just exploring. Missions in volve delivering cargo, capturing or assassinating other pilots, and just plain making a nuisance of yourself.

To make a profit, you could opt to trade cargo between various space stations, or become a space pirate and steal cargo. You can join the police force, or become a bounty hunter and track and destroy or capture the criminals in the galaxy. You can mine asteroids, act as a high speed courier or taxi paying customers from sector to sector. 

Making a profit on these activities is not guaranteed, however. You'll need some very nice(and expensive) equipment to track any criminals and some very nice weapons to have a chance in heck of killing them. Mining asteroids pays about as well as sweeping up hair in a salon. And paying customers? Hah! I've seen taxi drivers in New York get better wages.


As a space captain you can fly any of over a hundred ships in the Flatspace universe, providing you can afford the price tag. But that's unlikely. Let me warn you right now, this game is very, very hard.

Combat is difficult and unforgiving. Making money is hard. Everything is expensive and there aren't millionaires handing out buckets of cash for you to deliver a crate of plastic toys to their apartment in a station five hundred miles away(they generally pay about $500 for a mission like that, whereas a fairly low end ship costs $100,000).
Ships can be customised with many different fittings, all of them expensive, even the worthless ones. Weapons, shield units, generators, trackers and scanners, tractor beams, stun beams, mines and missiles and many more items are available and they all cost a fortune. And to top it all off your ship can only hold so much, so you have to make a tradeoff between what items you need and what items will actually fit. Unfortunately most of the good equipment is either really big or really expensive, and without good equipment the game is even harder.


Combat involves shooting up the enemy ship with lasers, cannons, machine guns, and whatever missiles you can afford(there's a dozen different kinds, all expensive), all while avoiding their own offensive weaponry. 

Problems quickly surface: the AI in this game is a little wonky. They'll fly at you and exhaust every single drop of ammunition in their ship(and all their missiles too) - and then they'll just follow you around, rather than retreating or letting their lasers recharge.

Missiles, too, are messed up. They fly in huge circles rather than just going straight for the target, and if any other ship or asteroid gets in the way, they'll smash right into it.

This has the nasty side-effect that you can shoot yourself down with your own missiles if you accidentally get in the way. On the plus side, if you don't carry a flare launcher(takes up a lot of room) to shoot down missiles, you can evade the missiles pretty easily.

The major problem with combat is this: for such an integral part of the game, it's not very fun. If you're flying a small ship, it only takes a few laser strikes or one missile to practically disable your ship, and once that happens you're dead. Dead dead dead. And flying one of the larger ships is a lesson in masochism. They turn about as quickly as the Empire State Building on roller skates, so you usually encounter half a dozen small ships that unload a staggering amount of firepower into your engines before you can even turn around. They then sit there and watch as you explode.

It gets worse though. If you do a bad job fitting out your ship(very easy to do, very hard to do right), you'll end up with a laser cannon that takes forever to recharge and depletes itself in about five seconds. And if you decide to go with a machine gun, you'll have to carry around boxes of ammo in your hold or you'll be running out of bullets every five minutes or so.

That's not the only problem with this game though. Bounty hunting? Without a really expensive scanner you won't even know where your targets are! Not to mention you need a good tractor beam and room in your cargo bay for the enemy pilot if you're capturing him alive, and those are two things that are rarities in Flatspace.

Another rarity is law-abiding pilots, which means most of the ships you encounter have criminals at the helm. And they have bounties on their heads, so you can kill them without provocation and get paid for it! Unfortunately the bounties are never more than a thousand dollars or so, so becoming The Punisher of Flatspace is a good way to end up in debtor's prison. 

Travelling around the universe is also difficult. It's quite large, but without a really big(and expensive) hyperdrive, you can only jump a few sectors at a time, and it takes quite a while for your hyperdrive to recharge before you can jump again. In addition to that, travelling across space using your normal engines takes forever even if you're in a fast ship. 

The interface is also terrible. Scrolling through lists of equipment and weapons takes absolutely forever. Buying and selling items is made as difficult as possible. You can't just swap your core generator out for a new one. You have to find your old one in the list of items, sell it, then scroll back to the new one and click buy. Only to be told that there's no room on your ship because you installed a hyperdrive that isn't worthless. Or that you don't have enough points in whatever guild to buy it. Or that it's not the right size for your ship.

The worst part about this game is that there's a wonderful game experience underneath all the problems screaming to be let out. Flatspace 2 could have been so much better, but it's basically ruined by several decisions the developer made that should never have gotten past the beta testers. 

On a positive note, the musc is in this game is awesome(and composed by the man who programmed the game and created the graphics, so he's quite talented in some ways). The graphics are also really nice, while being low-key enough that this game will run quite well on almost any computer running Windows. Unfortunately it requires an unbelievable amount of time to actually get anywhere in the game, and once you get there you find out the game gets even harder!

Check out the demo, you may find something you like about it. You may also find yourself smashing your head into your desk time and time again. Don't say I didn't warn you!

Appropriateness: No cussing, no sex, no vampires. Violence is low-key and only involves blowing up other ships. There are a few things to be aware of though.

One way to make money in Flatspace is by capturing pilots from a different race and selling them as slaves or for use in experiments. But that would be totally unethical of course - and the police will come after you if they catch you doing this.

Secondly, after you destroy an enemy ship the pilot and his crew are ejected in lifepods. You can leave them floating in space, take them aboard your ship, or kill them by shooting the lifepods. You can also eject your own crew into space, presumably to die.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the fact that the entire story is focused on the grapple between good and evil and, ultimately, the idea of God. It takes place during a war that feels a lot like a smaller version of The Crusades, minus the whole "forcing people to become Christian" schpeel. The main character is always mentioning how God will help them through whatever comes their way and his friend is always talking about how God isn’t helping much at all. There’s even a scene where someone gets “possessed” by God, thus making him super powerful. That being said, let's move on to gameplay.

Vandal Hearts is a tactical RPG of the simplest sense. You move from square to square casting various spells and attacking various enemies along the way, all while taking turns with the other characters. You have customizable weapon and armor load outs (though there isn't much variation among the weapons nor the armor pieces) and, based on your character's dexterity, you can only move a certain amount of spaces in any given direction.

Though it does nothing new for the genre, the battle system felt fluid , the controls were practically perfect, the entire game felt stable and, surprisingly, I found not one bug in my entire run through.

I was surprised at how much I enjoyed slowly moving digital beings from one square to another, due to the fact that I’m not a huge fan of waiting to do something in a video game. My attention span is little to nonexistent. I prefer fast paced action games, ala Left 4 Dead,Mass Effect and Darksiders. But Vandal Hearts makes me forget all of this. 

Due to how slow the game progresses, Vandal Hearts, like any Final Fantasy game ever made, is one of those games that is fantastic to play, but not so fantastic to watch. Whenever I’d be playing the game via our living room HD television and someone stopped to watch me play, they either walked away before the a minute passed, groaned and complained about how boring it looked or simply said the most ignorant thing someone could say about a game after watching you play for roughly 12 seconds, “This game is stupid.”

But don’t let those whiny people bring you down because Vandal Hearts is far from stupid. There are plenty of different things you can buy to equip your character for battle (like swords, maces, chest plates and boots, to name a few) and the game has an interesting skill and spell development system. Based on how often you use a specific weapon or spell, you advance a level in that spell or weapon’s skill tract. You can eventually reach level 40 for each skill and spell. I thought this was a pretty good method of leveling up skills and spells as they’re an essential aspect to combat the various enemies you face.

I had only one issue with the spell and skill system, and it was probably the main issue I had with the game. In order for a character to learn a new spell, they must carry the spell book until the spell reaches level 5. The issue I had was that you never really get a crash course on how to learn new spells. I mean, there’s a hint that pops up in the loading screen about it, but I never saw it until I was almost at the end of the game. Until that moment, I was convinced that I had to waste one of my two precious inventory slots just so one of my characters could summon balls of fire from the sky.

One last little tidbit I should mention: Graphics. Overall, the game’s graphics are above average. For a Playstation Network (PSN), the character designs are pretty smooth and the spells look very detailed. The only issues I had involving graphics were the cinematics. They’re drawn up in some sort of 2-D, cartoony style that makes all of the characters’ heads nearly as big as their bodies.

After my last save, my final opinion about Vandal Hearts was firm. It's a quality PSN title. It is a tactical RPG in almost the purest form. It will not disappoint casual tactical RPG-ers. If you have a few extra bucks and you want to buy an entertaining PSN game that will take you a good five or six hours to complete and give you some easily obtained trophies, Vandal Hearts is definitely the game to go to.

-Nick Lara (Check out my blog http://nextlevelnick.blogspot.com/ )

Thank you GamersGate for giving us this game to review!

This is a game with a very simple premise, as you'd expect: Bob is an alien flying around in his space ship, and he’s running late for work. With Murphy’s Law still intact on this alien world, his ship breaks apart and all of the pieces land on an unfamiliar planet. Bob must get his ship back together and head to work.

Bob Came In Pieces is a 3D physics based puzzle game. The main game offers fourteen levels with additional levels and six more available after you patch the software to version 1.4. In the campaign, each level has five pieces of your ship waiting for you. Although finding the pieces are optional, it’s really in your best interest to collect all of them since they will help you solve the puzzles in the game.

Each level has a new theme or is geared toward teaching you how to solve a certain puzzle. For example, some levels will focus on burning things and others will focus on pushing or pulling objects around that are blocking the pieces of your ship. The earlier puzzles are reused in the later levels in addition to new puzzles.

Moving your ship around the levels is pretty straight forward. The arrow keys are the default controls, and there are check points where you can re-configure your ship and re-bind the keys. You can test drive your ship before you leave the work shop. Chances are that you’ll get stuck and when you do, hitting the enter key will take you to the last checkpoint/workshop. There are many checkpoints scattered through the levels, thankfully, and they serve as a quicksave. If you resume a level you’ll have to start from the beginning but the pieces you have collected so far in that level will still be in your possession.

Since this is a game involving physics, it should come as no surprise that many of the puzzles require you to manipulate various objects to recover your ship parts. Fortunately the physics in this game are very good and are very easy to work with. You’ll be pushing, pulling, picking up and dropping items into various places, but the controls are not a hindrance unlike in some other games. 

Monkeying with the physics system won't solve all the puzzles, however, and you’ll have to redesign your ship to help you reach certain items. Changing your ship moves the center of gravity and also affects the weight and the balance, so be sure you have a handle on the new characteristics of your ship before flying into dangerous places.

The developers did a wonderful job with the various colors and animations in the game. The cheery maps and the level of detail reminds me of some old Gamecube games. They’re not cutting edge, but they're very pretty and pleasant to look at.