cooked gaming

Metro: Last Light starts with a bang -  captured by Nazis and forced to escape their gas chamber prison – the game throws you back to the deadly Moscow Metro with brute force, painting for you an even clearer picture of life in this nuclear future. It came out initially in 2013, and in 2014, it was remastered as Redux, and a version for Switch came out in 2020. The game was well received by fans and reviewers, and it’s become a bit of a cult classic in the footsteps of its predecessor Metro 2033. The gun mechanics of Redux are a step up from the original, and the combat is challenging, but treats you with respect, giving you the choice to take in every encounter. Theres a lot more ammo than in Metro 2033, but it doesn’t change much of the core premise – scarcity still defines this game, you run out of filters, you choke and die. You run out of bullets, you’re _____. It makes you anxious at all times about how many bullets, how many filters, medkits, you have, and adds so much to t...

Black is an explosion filled, action jammed rollercoaster of a shooter. Released in 2006 by Criterion Games for the PS2 and for the Xbox, the game was one of the last great games of the era – the Xbox 360 had already been out for a couple of months, and the PS3 was to follow at the end of the year. The guns and destruction in this game are just awesome, as a kid I’d never played a game with such wicked shotguns, or awesome RPG effects, the environment reacting to every bullet and grenade with a hail of glass or crumbling of a wall. The graphics are just awesome too – the post processing in this game was next level for games from the era, which largely avoided it entirely. The environments are pretty awesome but I’ve always found the level design and story to be a bit clunky and strange. The first mission just… ends at this doorway with a cutscene then explaining what happened next. It’s a bit odd, for sure. The game is very difficult too – the enemies are the highest grade of bullet sp...

Anger Foot is a wicked new game coming out in 2023, and not a single second of it isn’t spent door clobbering and snap shooting your enemies. The pace of this game is blitzingly fast, starting you out with just your shoes and progressing on to absolute madness, dodging grenades and shooting bad guys left, right and center. The graphics are wicked too, an awesome stylistic grunginess permeating all the levels. The game comes out later this year, but for now, there is a demo available on Steam – give it a shot! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1978590/Anger_Foot/

2004 was one of the most incredible years in gaming, bringing us some of the most widely revered videogames in history, and the launch of the Nintendo DS, one of the widest selling handhelds of all time. And The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay is amongst them – a relic from an era when games were made with love, when the potential of first person shooters as a holistic, immersive experience was really being explored, a true passion that seems largely lost in the industry now. The stealth mechanics were greatly inspired by Thief and Deus Ex, forcing you into the shadows with super difficult combat and touchy stealth. Riddick’s superpower is that he can see in the dark and turning off lights in sections can leave your enemies floundering as you quietly pick them off, bringing together all of the games mechanics and making you think constantly about how to engage. And I think the coolest thing about this game is the actual prison itself – the haunting screams of the prisone...

Wolfenstein was released in 2009 to a massive…. FLOP 35 people got fired from Raven Software on the DAY it was released. The game did terribly, selling only 100,000 copies in the first month, which compared to other titles of that year, is HORRENDOUS. And finally, in 2014, with the release of Wolfenstein: The New Order, the game was delisted from all online platforms, new retail sales having already long since stopped. So, what went so wrong? The game starts – after some cutscenes – in a train. You shoot some bad guys, then blow up a another train – which is where the weird Wolfenstein shit starts. The train blowing up disturbs the gravitational field in the room, sending you flying amongst Nazis and bullets as you finish off the level. The next mission you are introduced to the Void. And oh man is this painful. The Void is honestly one of my least favourite special abilities in any game ever. It just feels so artificial, it doesn’t work well, and it would be twice the game without it....