Warp Zoned Presents
Most Recent: Top Story
Hitman: Intro Pack Review: For Better or Worse, the Same Old Hitman
As long as I have been playing the Hitman games, I have always been struck by the strange dissonance between the way the series is marketed and the way it actually plays. In adverts, cutscenes, and promotional art, Hitman games are always presented as offering a power fantasy in which you play as a globetrotting, sharply-dressed, dual pistol-wielding assassin. This is strange because, as anyone who has played a Hitman game will tell you, the games are actually much more about dressing as an engineer and rigging an oven to explode, or disguising yourself as a waiter and spiking your target’s drink with a laxative so that you can murder them in the privacy of the bathroom. This pattern holds for IO Interactive’s new entry in the Hitman series, and, for fans at least, this is good news. Even if this game is something of a known quantity, it does still manage to deliver that same incredibly cool feeling that comes with watching a chandelier “accidentally” fall on your target and walking out without anyone suspecting foul play. (more…)
It’s In Your Blood: A History of Horror Games (Part One)
Video games as a medium are diverse and long-lasting, with something to offer everybody. From those obsessed with scores and bragging rights, to more relaxed individuals looking for an enthralling story with limited interaction, gamers who spend upwards of 100 hours in open worlds with random battles… and even the oddballs who just want to get the crap scared out of us.
In the era of Outlast and Five Nights at Freddy’s, horror games are perhaps more popular now than they’ve ever been. Even the experiences vary wildly, with Dead Space and Resident Evil offering up action alongside grotesque body horror, while Kholat and Layers of Fear focus on more cerebral scares and intriguing stories. YouTubers PewDiePie and Markiplier have made such games approachable to a larger audience, thanks to the comedic charm of their commentary and presentation — but to truly appreciate the booming horror genre, one must take a look back at its history. (more…)
Broforce Review: A Geri-Action-Packed Shooter
At first glance, Broforce seems to be an incredibly simple game. In each level, you run from left to right until you reach the end, killing any enemies who get in your way, with the occasional necessary exception of killing a boss before you can leave the level. While this might sound like a rather stagnant formula, Broforce, with its large roster of characters, emergent chaos, and four-player co-op, is designed to constantly descend into the kind of explosive mayhem that was so much fun in the action movies that the game borrows so liberally from. (more…)
Street Fighter V Review: Here Comes A (Mostly) New Challenger
In 1991, my friends and I habitually visited Fielder’s Choice, a sports card shop in the Chicagoland area. There, we bought and traded cards with fellow card aficionados. My poison of choice were the baseball cards from Topps. I even think I still have my Roberto Alomar Desert Shield card still laying around somewhere. Sorry, I’m getting off-base here. The reason I mention this shop is because one day, we strolled into Fielder’s Choice and saw that the owner had put up a Street Fighter II arcade machine. That day, we ended up spending all our card money on this new, amazing game.
For months after that, we ditched the card-collecting scene and joined in on the fun, fast-paced world of beating the crap out of each other. Later, my buddy Andy got the console version for his Super Nintendo. A few months after that, Fielders Choice went under. I’m not saying it’s a direct correlation, but yeah. Point being, I grew up with the Street Fighter franchise. But as the years went by, we grew in two different directions. The fighting system became way too sophisticated, and just I couldn’t keep up. When I finally got into Street Fighter IV, I wasn’t able to last thirty seconds in an online match. Expecting more of the same, I came into Street Fighter V with some trepidation. But now, I’m feeling a lot like I did 25 years ago. (more…)
Posted in PC, PS4, Reviews, Top Story
Tagged Street Fighter V
Yoshi’s Woolly World Review: Nintendo and Good-Feel Sew Up A Colourful Treat
Despite those open-world sandbox games that eat up half the hours in a day being all the rage, Nintendo has continued to enjoy immense success with its traditional 2D platformers. They still excel at this genre, even more than 30 years after Super Mario Bros was released on the NES. Yoshi’s Woolly World is a semi-sequel to 1997’s SNES hit Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island and the N64’s Yoshi’s Story, but does it capture the magic of these past games, or does it simply unravel? (more…)
Posted in Reviews, Top Story, Wii U
Tagged Yoshi's Woolly World
The Games of March 2016
For the most part, we here at Warp Zoned are all pretty excited about some Nintendo game or another coming out this month! But that’s not all. Read on to find out what we’re excited to play this March! (more…)
Warpback: What We Played in February 2016
Even when the calendar of new releases is sparse, we here at Warp Zoned know it’s important to keep our controllers charged. We hit our backlogs hard in February, playing everything from Dark Souls to Destiny, while still keeping it fresh with a handful of newer releases. Read on to see what games kept us warm during this cold month! (more…)
Tharsis Review: Survival is a Dicey Affair
Five weeks ago, my ship was struck by a micrometeoroid storm that killed two of the six crew and irreparably damaged the ship. Since then, two more crew members have died and been cannibalised (we ran out of food), and many of the ship’s systems have gone offline. The two remaining crew members are hungry, tired, very badly injured, and still five weeks from Mars. Relatively speaking, things are going pretty well.
Tharsis is a board game with teeth. Every decision you make will feel the best of a bad bunch, and even then you might roll snake eyes and be locked out of making that decision. Tharsis is really, really hard, and the fact that your ability to act is based on dice rolls means that even if you are a strategic genius, you can still end up with a dead crew seven weeks away from Mars. (more…)