Worth Writing Home About: AssCreed Revelations & More

Assassin's Creed: Revelations - Most of what I play games for comes in singleplayer packages, but Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood in multiplayer really captured my attention, and its follow up does so in very much the same way. I can't speak for the campaign, because it seems like it's been much the same since the second game, and I'm bored of just holding down three buttons and watching as Ezio does all the hard work. Multiplayer is essentially a polished, profitable version of The Ship: act like an NPC so your hunter won't spot you, while simultaneously tracking down your own quarry. Unlike the CoDs and Battlefields, this rewards patience, planning and smarts over trigger fingers, and is massivey satisfying for it. In fact, after L4D I think this is my favourite multiplayer game of all time. It dosn't strictly deserve a high tilt score since it's identical to its forebear and draws uncomfortably from The Ship, but what the hell. It's a smart, competitive game, and it's outstanding.

Polish: 2 out of 2

Tilt: 2 out of 2

Oil Rush - Another cheap Steam strategy offering, this time with less to recommend. I don't know why I played this game to the end (I do: it's short and vaguely addictive). It's Eufloria, only with an entirely superfluous 3D engine, and set at sea. Perhaps it has some twitchy multiplayer complexities I'm unaware of, but failing that there's little here of interest.

Polish: 1 out of 2

Tilt: 0 out of 2

Postal III - OK, so I only managed about half an hour of this one. Believe everything you've read: this is not a good game. I was a huge fan of Postal II back in the early noughties: for the time its open world was more innovative, its satire more necessary than the poo jokes suggested to many. Sure it was rough at times, but it was worth sticking with. This game, on the other hand, is just not finished. It is not fun. It is a poorly made (or at least a drastically rushed) game that fails in most respects. If this looks good to you, go pickup the second one instead. Fewer badgers, more collsion detection. Still, if you're reading this, Running With Scissors - I'd kill to work on the fourth one. There's so much potential here, I honestly would.

Polish: 0 out of 2

Tilt: 1 out of 2

Dead Island - I'm a sucker for zombie stuff, and the agency that put out that trailer has been drafted onto a project I'm working on, so I figured I'd check this out. It's fun, and it's pretty, but to be honest hitting zombies just doesn't hold as much tactical engagement for me as shooting the buggers (or even better, running away from them). here, you run from place to place, you click a lot, and that's that. I got a good six hours in before tedium set in, but set in it most definitely did.

Polish: 1 out of 2

Tilt: 1 out of 2

Bestseller - Worst game name ever (I spent ten minutes trying to google it, only to keep returning games that made a lot of money). This one caught my eye on a list of indie games because it's one of those database-based life simulators (a la Kudos, GameDevStory or Alter Ego), only oriented around the life of an author. Frankly I picked it up knowing roughly what sort of thing it would be, and when I found out that it was I dropped it. For what I played of the demo it looked a decent amount more complex than most offerings, but I'd still struggle to sink time into this over a more content-driven game or, you know, doing some actual writing.

Polish: 1 out of 2

Tilt: 1 out of 2