Upon premiering on Xbox 360, Braid immediately joined Aquaria, Darwinia, Samorost, and World of Goo in the gold reserve of indie games. Its indie roots show through outdated, but stylish graphics, great music, and original ideas. Braid challenges your gray matter, but it does so in such a subtle and elegant ways that you can’t help but fall in love with it.

Akella, Russian distributor of the game, pulled a crazy marketing stunt. In addition to the regular PC release, it sells the game as two independent halves – Escape from Butcher Bay and Assault on Dark Athena. My gut reaction was to scold Akella for greediness, but now I see that this is an unintentional benefit. You buy the remake of one of the best action games of 2004, and forget about its defective 6-hour appendage.

Akella, Russian distributor of the game, pulled a crazy marketing stunt. In addition to the regular PC release, it sells the game as two independent halves – Escape from Butcher Bay and Assault on Dark Athena. My gut reaction was to scold Akella for greediness, but now I see that this is an unintentional benefit. You buy the remake of one of the best action games of 2004, and forget about its defective 6-hour appendage.

Establishing a new Family is a hard undertaking… and a tedious chore. Imagine spending 10+ hours on taking over one building after another! In GTA: San Andreas and The Godfather, this occupation was but a side attraction; here, it is everything.

Establishing a new Family is a hard undertaking… and a tedious chore. Imagine spending 10+ hours on taking over one building after another! In GTA: San Andreas and The Godfather, this occupation was but a side attraction; here, it is everything.

Establishing a new Family is a hard undertaking… and a tedious chore. Imagine spending 10+ hours on taking over one building after another! In GTA: San Andreas and The Godfather, this occupation was but a side attraction; here, it is everything.

What’s the difference between Relic Entertainment and a large dairy farm in the neighborhood of Vancouver? Relic is better at milking its cows. Tales of Valor feels like a crisis management by-product, as if its design document was written by a marketing executive, edited by the chief financial officer, and polished by PR staff.

Akella, Russian distributor of the game, pulled a crazy marketing stunt. In addition to the regular PC release, it sells the game as two independent halves – Escape from Butcher Bay and Assault on Dark Athena. My gut reaction was to scold Akella for greediness, but now I see that this is an unintentional benefit. You buy the remake of one of the best action games of 2004, and forget about its defective 6-hour appendage.

By (re)introducing some of the original ideas that never made it into Fantasy Wars, Elven Legacy became even more captivating than its predecessor.

Don’t look for great accomplishments and fresh ideas in Flock!. It’s foolish to expect something revolutionary from critters that gave rise to the word “mutton-head”.

How to lose friends and make everyone hate you? Here’s a recipe “from Vivendi”: kill a good publisher, take one of its classic adventure franchises, give it to the creators of Worms, spend all money on Hollywood talent voice-overs, and hope for a profit.

Tracks are what makes Resurrection so memorable. It’s hard to forget battles on the decaying streets of once-beautiful cities. Forgotten, overgrown San Diego, rainy Bangkok, mysterious Prague, snowbound Moscow...These places look fantastic.

“Never get out of the car”, the heroes of Interstate ’76 used to say. If the developers of Wheelman decided to follow this credo, they could have focused their efforts on turning lifeless Barcelona into a real city, instead of churning out boring TPS sequences. Or they could have made a menu for editing keyboard shortcuts. Or re-do boring side missions and build them into the story.

One can’t blame this failure on the studio's youth or lack of experience. The Creative Assembly Australia are not some clumsy outsourcers. After all, the well-received Kingdoms expansion to Medieval 2: Total War was entirely their doing. This is why Stormrise is not just another faceless RTS clone, but a total disaster.

Cold language of numbers is the best way to describe Wanted. 9 levels, 5 enemy types, 4 hours to complete, 2 weapons, 0 multiplayer modes, 0 "wow" moments, 0 thoughts about playing this game again…

Cold language of numbers is the best way to describe Wanted. 9 levels, 5 enemy types, 4 hours to complete, 2 weapons, 0 multiplayer modes, 0 "wow" moments, 0 thoughts about playing this game again…

Predictable from the get-go, wrapped in a blanket of tired clichés, without an ounce of adrenaline in its blood, Dark Sector has finally surfaced after eight years of oblivion, yet nobody seems to care.

It’s easy to understand the initial excitement of PC users about this game – after all, Japanese RPGs visit the Windows kingdom once in a blue moon. Alas, dullness, even when properly ported, won’t become more beautiful or clever because of it, especially if it is produced by Square Enix who always has some kind of The Last Remnant per every masterpiece like The World Ends with You.

Unlike Operation: Anchorage, brief, dullish adventures in Pittsburgh are actually worth $10. It seems Bethesda has finally found the right formula for Fallout 3 expansions, although it’s far from being perfect.

While BattleForge is quite costly to play and has some shortcomings, it is one of the most thought-out and engaging multiplayer RTS of the last few years. And it is definitely the most original one.

Cold language of numbers is the best way to describe Wanted. 9 levels, 5 enemy types, 4 hours to complete, 2 weapons, 0 multiplayer modes, 0 "wow" moments, 0 thoughts about playing this game again…

Unlike Operation: Anchorage, brief, dullish adventures in Pittsburgh are actually worth $10. It seems Bethesda has finally found the right formula for Fallout 3 expansions, although it’s far from being perfect.

An art connoisseur will be in raptures over the perfect, highly stylized look of The Path. A gamer will walk about the forest for 10 minutes and uninstall it. And both will be right in their own way.

H.A.W.X. sorely lacks in the epic battles department. There is no one else really fighting in the sky, besides you and two wingmen who react to commands like “Engage!” and “Cover me”. While the sky is almost empty, the ground is unnaturally clean: there are no signs of destruction, no shell holes, no burning armor... Even for an arcade game, H.A.W.X. is full of conventions.

It’s not a game, but three hours of torture, complete with broken scripts and frequent crashes.

To avoid the risks while working on an expensive next-gen sequel to Resident Evil 4, Capcom recycled the previous game. The developers moved the action from Spain to Africa, replaced Leon Kennedy with Chris Redfield, brought back Albert “Duke Nukem” Wesker as the main baddie, added co-op, and rested. Look past the pretty graphics, and you will see a shameless clone.

To avoid the risks while working on an expensive next-gen sequel to Resident Evil 4, Capcom recycled the previous game. The developers moved the action from Spain to Africa, replaced Leon Kennedy with Chris Redfield, brought back Albert “Duke Nukem” Wesker as the main baddie, added co-op, and rested. Look past the pretty graphics, and you will see a shameless clone.

Uprising is Red Alert 3 sans its already weak merits. Cinematics with nice-looking aides and a few great tunes by Frank Klepacki and James Hannigan are not worth $20. It’s silly to expect much from a cheap DLC, but Uprising makes Kane’s Wrath look like a fine expansion, while Firestorm and Yuri’s Revenge are blockbusters compared to it.