Oct 1

While it’s tempting to compare Guild Wars to any number of other fantasy-themed role-playing games, there’s really never been anything quite like it before. It innovatively and successfully combines many of the best, most addictive properties of action RPGs, online RPGs, and competitive multiplayer games in one beautifully produced package, which offers a tremendous lasting value yet none of the monthly fees typically associated with online-only games. The first title from developer ArenaNet, Guild Wars threatens the entire online RPG establishment with its bold design. More importantly, it’s a very impressive game that’s rewarding on many different levels and can be tremendously appealing for any number of reasons.


In the world of Guild Wars, the men are men, and the women are runway models. Oh, and it’s awesome.

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Oct 1

If you like your shooters built on nostalgic value, Meridian4 and Frozenbyte’s Shadowgrounds might be up your alley. A top-down shooter in the vein of Smash TV with an atmospheric twist that borrows heavily from the Doom series, Shadowgrounds has simplistic mechanics but uses challenging gameplay to back them up. Unfortunately, challenging doesn’t always equate to fun, and in the case of Shadowgrounds, its difficulty doesn’t make the action any less monotonous as time goes on. Rather than testing your skill by throwing huge gangs of enemies at you, as many old-school top-down shooters tended to do, Shadowgrounds keeps its enemy attacks regulated to short bursts done to induce some kind of jump or scare in you. The trouble is that it’s not effective. Shadowgrounds is too campy to be even remotely moody or scary, and without the scares, the action just comes across as kind of flat after a while.


The top down shooter hasn’t gotten much love in recent years, especially on the PC. Kudos to Shadowgrounds for at least trying to kickstart the genre again.

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