The whales are the celebs of The Knife of Dunwall, Dishonored’s first story-led DLC. As Corvo we’d catch glimpses of them within the distance, strung up on huge ships; here, playing as master assassin Daud, we finally see the nice beasts up close – and it isn’t a lovely sight.

The 1st mission sees Daud infiltrating the cavernous Rothwild Slaughterhouse. A live whale is hoisted from the ceiling of an enormous chamber, guts spilling from its belly right into a drain below – a similar drain we used to sneak into the awful abattoir undetected.

As we slip throughout the shadows past blood-spattered butchers clutching menacing electric saws, the whale groans in agony. Daud is there to locate and interrogate the landlord, Bundry Rothwild, and as you possibly can expect from Dishonored, the way you do it’s as much as you.

Daud, played by gravel-voiced Hollywood veteran Michael Madsen, isn’t that different from Corvo. Any play style that suited you by and large game will work here, although he does have a couple of new tricks, in addition to enhanced versions of old powers.

The hot Blink turns you briefly invisible, meaning that you can phase past guards of their line of sight without them seeing you. Void Gaze is equal to Dark Vision, only now it highlights the locations of runes and bone charms, replacing the center.

New to this DLC is the facility to summon assassins. They’ll engage guards in combat, allowing you to slink past unnoticed while they’re distracted. It is a useful power, but you will not be ready to use it if you wish to get through a mission without killing anyone.

Chokedust, a grenade that stuns enemies, is the good new gadget. A mission sees you rescuing assassins who’re tied up and surrounded by guards. Instead of kill/sedate them, toss in some chokedust, free your buddy, then blink away before they recover.

Arc Mines vapourise enemies once they trigger them, like portable Walls of sunshine, and rather than a crossbow, Daud fires bolts from a tool hidden away in his sleeve. There are numerous new toys to play with within the sandbox, but nothing radically game-changing.

Experimentation is what defines Dishonored, and the DLC isn’t any different. Understanding interesting how to combine these new powers and gadgets is where much of the joys lies, like sticking an Arc Mine to a rat’s back and watching it zap an oblivious guard.

There are three missions here. The primary two are great – nearly as good as anything mainly game, in truth – however the last one is disappointing. They took us roughly two hours each, so there is a decent amount of game here in your £8, even supposing the standard isn’t totally consistent.

Trion Worlds has balls. It’s attempting to accomplish that many stuff with Defiance that it’s near impossible to not take notice. This can be a massively multiplayer online third-person shooter (a MMOTPS, then) set in a persistent world crammed with thousands of players, and it’s busy charting a dangerous path in the course of the murky MMO waters of infamously rigid Xbox Live and PSN online spaces.

Oh, and it is also on traditional PC platforms too, without a doubt . Oh, and it’s tied right into a multi-million dollar Hollywood-produced TV series of an identical name, sharing locations, characters, weapons, vehicles, clothing, events and, significantly, storylines. So why does it still feel underwhelming

You play the role of an Ark Hunter; one of those 22nd Century Crocodile Dundee

Set in a violently terraformed future San Francisco, Defiance gives us a dystopic playground wherein aliens have landed and there will be no phoning home, thanks a great deal. The Votan, as they’re called, are here to remain and while some, just like the playable slant-nosed Irathients, are agreeable, others, just like the tellingly-named Hellbugs, are less so. You play the role of an Ark Hunter, a 22nd century Crocodile Dundee, sent out into the hot world to loot resources from giant, crystalline, bug-spouting rock spires that occasionally pop up within the landscape.

There are two story branches to follow: that of the sport and that of the show. The primary has your oddly silent avatar follow the escapades of your employer, Von Bach, poking sticks at ArkTech in a highly scientific (read: jibber jabber nonsensical) attempt at fixing the ravaged world.

The other, more arresting, story arcs are available the shape of Episode Missions. These take cues directly from the television show, and involve its more fully developed characters. How these will evolve with the flow of the series remains to be unknown. With the exception of these stories there also are hundreds of events, time trials and challenges littered around a large map.

EGO-CENTRIC

Typical quests involve disarming bombs, hacking terminals, freeing hostages or examining dead bodies. Essentially this implies reaching a local, clearing it of enemies after which holding a button over an objective marker. It is a bog standard quest offering, but one element which adds a little Bombay mix into this poorly disguised pub grub is the glorious number of the arsenal.

Weapons should be would becould very well be infused with elemental effects and a Halo-esque two weapon limit forces you to think of your loadout carefully. A deadbolt electro-sniper rifle and plasma-modded machine gun combo can be all well and good for when you are blazing across open ground towards Arkfall. But head right into a bunker, complete with rushing mobs, and you can quickly end up wishing for that pump-action scattergun you sold off for simple scrip (the game’s currency).

Other major choices to make are available in the shape of EGO powers. These can also be activated off the back of a groovy down and fuel your preferred gameplay style. Blur promises a burst of speed and allows meatier rushed melee attacks, which proves great for balls-to-the-wall types.

Out and out snipers can turn invisible with the Cloak skill, while Decoy and Overcharge send out holograms or power up your ammo respectively. In addition these there are myriad other passive abilities and buffs to peruse with each level gained.

This depth of choice during your character’s development undermines your commence decision, however. From the get-go you are able to decide to be a Veteran, a Survivalist, an Outlaw or a Machinist, but inspite of that you opt for, the alternative feels about as heavy as Gok Wan’s man bag, affecting little as opposed to your avatar’s fashion sense.

You’re getting your head kicked in. There are three guys surrounding you and each time you focus your attention on one among them, it only gives any other two a free opening to swing a punch at you.

You attempt to block or counter certainly one of their attacks, but doing that tires you out and that provides another person the danger to continue the assault. It doesn’t matter what you are trying to do, you’re destined to finish up in your backside.

Suddenly, one of the crucial three foes decides he’s had enough and starts to run away. He oddly opts to run right into a corner and keeps running into it, galloping prompt in a ridiculous manner. The opposite two enemies slowly continue their beat-down and as you curse loudly while your last slither of life is unfairly stolen, you glance over to the corner and spot the third foe, who’s still walking into the corner, glitch throughout the wall and disappear into the scenery. Welcome to the realm of Double Dragon II.

The above scenario genuinely happened to us ten minutes into the sport, and it wasn’t a freak one-off occurrence. Double Dragon II is an abomination of a game, one who will actually make you angry as you play – angry that the sport is so horribly imbalanced, angry that it feels more like an alpha demo than a finished product, and angry that somebody actually had the gall to determine “yup, it really is ready” and release it, robbing 800 Microsoft Points from anyone foolish enough to be swayed by nostalgia or to think it’s from a similar studio that released the superb Double Dragon Neon last year.

You can tell you’re in for a miserable experience once you begin the sport and are presented with among the many worst tutorials in recent memory. Instructions are accompanied by a grumbling, murmuring voice with an echo effect applied, a disinterested voice that does not even say what it’s presupposed to (as evidenced while you turn the subtitles on) and instead decides to regard the English language with an analogous contempt that the beat ’em up genre is treated with inside the remainder of the sport.

Dragon Balls

Combat makes us livid just serious about it. You’re limited to a common punch combo, a typical kick combo or switching between the 2. Both are ultimately useless though because, as previously explained, initiating a combo inevitably ends up in another individual feeding you a knuckle supper. Want some extra power You’re invited to carry the RT button as you pull off a combo – apparently this makes for more powerful moves but all it sort of feels to do is give your final punch a slow motion effect.

As if the suicide combo gameplay wasn’t frustrating enough, there’s also an absurd stamina meter which has you exhausted after a number of punches, leaving you much more exposed to the crowd you’re fighting and making it much more likely that you will be chewing pavement before long. You’ll block with LT (that is temperamental), and timing it right permits you to execute an ideal Guard, which in theory opens your enemy up for a counter-attack. Incredibly, Perfect Guards also drain your stamina, so your reward for countering an enemy punch is knackering your character and – you guessed it – leaving him wide open to attack from somebody else.

The temptation is to assert “ah, but, this can be a remake of an old game and old games were just harder back within the day”. No. Stop it. Just stop it immediately. That’s pish. The unique Double Dragon II, while tricky and clunky, was still a good fighter for its time.

Most retro games were difficult in a technique that encouraged you to master and ultimately overcome them – the NES Mega Man games were a shining example of this. Then there are games like this which are needlessly difficult as a result of bad game design, where no amount of practice will ever prevent you from getting hit with cheap attacks over and over.

The game clearly knows this too, chucking 20 credits at you from the beginning within the hope they’ll be enough to will let you make it kicking and screaming through its 15 levels. After all , by doing so it’s creating a hell of an assumption that you will have the saint-like patience to place up with its countless inadequacies and sloppy bugs for long enough to get to the top of the sport. The only real thing we found more taxing was penning this review while resisting the urge to scatter a navy’s worth of 4-letter words over it.

Rarely at the moment will we get to play a finished game (allegedly) that’s so jam-packed with bugs, riddle with glitches and horribly imbalanced. Double Dragon is a motorway pile-up of a game, and as such while there’s an obvious temptation to rubber-neck and take a look at the wear and tear, in no way for those who approach it.

In a murky Gotham alleyway, former lovebirds Joker and Harley Quinn trade practical joke-themed blows. Within the skies above them, Batman and Nightwing wage war, trading bitter insults as they try to clip each other’s wings for good. Meanwhile in Themyscira, Wonder Woman finally meets her match in… Wonder Woman Welcome to Injustice: Gods Among Us: the DC Universe as just a one-on-one beat-’em-up may be able to imagine it.

Except without a doubt that this is not our DC Universe. That’s right: in a brave try to squeeze all the above nonsense right into a single coherent narrative, NetherRealm has gone down the route most recently traveled by that game that we do not talk about, and dabbled in inter-dimensional travel.

And so we’re barely halfway into the primary chapter of the tale mode when Batman, Green Lantern and friends (oh, and the Joker, too) tumble down a wormhole like big clumsies right into a parallel dimension. Now, if TV and picture has taught us anything, it’s that this type of thing rarely works out well for anyone. But even by parallel dimensions’ low, low standards, this one’s a stinker.

“The result is among the most compelling beat-’em-up storylines we have seen shortly.”

Metropolis have been levelled by a Joker-deployed nuke for kick-off, and its charred remains have fallen under the tyrannical rule of a crazed Superman. He’s gone a bit of ‘wrong’ as a result of trauma of indirectly causing the death of his beloved Lois. Ravaged by guilt, he turns his anger onto the general public at large, reasoning that fear is the best technique to control them.

Most of the opposite superheroes have either been killed of their attempts to reason with him, or have sided with him out of fear, alongside a cabal of ‘reformed’ supervillans. Just a few insurgents remain – including some faces who you would not necessarily expect to peer siding with the nice guys – but their leader, Other Batman, have been incarcerated by Superman’s regime. In a final-ditch try to stop a guy who, remember, can snap spines like they’re Toffee Crisps, they suck our Justice League into their dimension and ask for assist in freeing their leader.

This could seem a slightly elaborate set-up merely to give an explanation for why the fairway Lantern is fighting his evil twin, but NetherRealm has dived into the other reality gimmick with gusto, and the outcome is likely one of the most compelling beat-’em-up storylines we have seen shortly.

This is a dimension where up is down; heroes become villains and villains become martyrs, all on the whim of a manic yet curiously coherent narrative, which frequently stops to ponder if the present allegiances as we all know them are nothing greater than a quirk of fate. It certainly never gets boring, particularly throughout the later stages where battles are punctuated by dramatic cut-scenes that play out like someone’s jammed the ultimate five minutes of each superhero film ever into some of the Fly’s telepods. Injustice has a watch for cinematic escalation that’s rare in games.

INJUSTICE LEAGUE

The story mode borrows a trick from its counterpart in NetherRealm’s previous game, the 2011 Mortal Kombat reboot, by flitting its perspective from character to character on a chapterly basis. This keeps the narrative moving at a brisk pace, but more importantly it eliminates the fatigue you may get from having to play because the same character, with a similar fighting style, for the complete duration of a campaign.

The drawback to this approach is that there is little reason to go back to the tale mode once you’ve completed it the once, but there are many complementary modes that add longevity. Probably the most expansive of that’s the S.T.A.R.S. Lab, which offers up a succession of character-specific challenges, with as much as three stars awarded for completing side-objectives along the manner. Here’s Injustice’s reminiscent of Mortal Kombat’s Tower mode – and prefer its predecessor, it occasionally spices things up with a number of, lets say, ‘out there’ challenges.

Then there’s Battle mode, which is composed of diverse gauntlet match challenges. They start sensibly enough – with match-ups pitting you against only heroes or only villains, as an instance – before branching out into odder territory. Among the many later modes has you tackle half the Justice League while poison slowly drains your health bar for example, and within the penultimate challenge you might want to tackle two foes simultaneously.

The average modern multiplayer shooter is bloated with perks, unlocks, and dumb gimmicks. ShootMania, the hot game from TrackMania developers Nadeo, is a non secular return to the times of Quake and Unreal Tournament, when skill was everything. This makes it a difficult sell. Some will appreciate its purity; others will find it archaic.

The sport was designed with the eSports community in mind. It’s fast, competitive, and thoroughly balanced. All players are given the identical three weapons, and there aren’t any upgrades or power-ups to talk of. It’s boldly simple.

The default weapon fires slow-moving balls of energy. They’ve got no splash damage, so every shot should be precise. Leading fast-moving opponents takes some being used to, but hitting a far off target with a well-placed shot is a lovely pay-off.

The opposite two weapons are activated while you step on certain map tiles. If you end up next to a window, you’ll automatically switch to an extended-range laser, comparable to Quake’s railgun. While you move to an interior, like a cave, it becomes a grenade launcher.

It’s a strange system. The small arsenal could make the combat feel limited, however it levels the playing field for tournament play, and every firing mode has its own quirks and nuances. While other online shooters see you unlocking a parade of increasingly powerful guns and attachments, here it is all about mastery of a hard and fast set of tools.

Character movement is fast and responsive. Dependent on what tile you’re standing on, the space bar/right mouse button will either make you jump or sprint. Jump pads and ramps send your character hurtling across the map, and you can hover briefly. It’s not a patch on Tribes: Ascend’s kinetic skiing, but it’s a good fit with the twitchy combat.

Like TrackMania, the base game – which retails at £15.99 – is only the beginning. A powerful editor is bundled with Storm, allowing players to create their own maps and modes. Depending on your skill level, you can make a basic deathmatch arena by dragging and dropping tiles, or use scripting tools to create something far more elaborate.

Some incredible stuff came out of the TrackMania community, but we’ve yet to see anything really remarkable in ShootMania – yet. We’ve mostly been playing the three modes that come bundled with the game: Royal, Elite, and Joust.

Royal is a frantic last-man-standing free-for-all. As the match progresses the map steadily shrinks, forcing players together in the centre. It’s a fun take at the familiar deathmatch format, although you do spend a lot of time spectating.

Elite sees three teams taking it in turns to attack and defend. The attacker is alone, but with a one-hit weapon, while the defenders – three of them – have to stop them scoring a point with normal guns. It’s a really unique mode, and easily Storm’s highlight.

Finally, Joust is a one-on-one mode that pits two players against each other. Weapons have to be loaded at charging stations, but other than that it is a fairly typical deathmatch. Joust is the weakest of the 3 modes, but so as to hone your skills in smaller maps without worrying about being caught in other players’ crossfire.

The problem is that ShootMania is probably too simplistic. PC gamers are spoiled for choice by way of multiplayer shooters, and a few of the good – like Tribes and PlanetSide 2 – don’t cost anything to play. At this early stage, £16 is simply too much for too little game. But which could change if the community gets a foothold and starts to supply new maps and modes. TrackMania took some time to become great, and so might this.