Monthly Archives: April 2016
Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare 2 Gets a Free Trial
You can now play Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare 2 for free — for a time.
EA's family friendly third-person shooter is getting a free trial. Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC players can download the trial through EA Origin and play the full game for 10 hours without charge.
Trial users who purchase the game afterwards can keep their accounts, and all progress made during the limited window.
Those who want to make the most out of their 10 hours might benefit from our Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare 2 wiki. There you'll find tips and tricks to help you progress through the game's many modes and lines of progression.
Aliens Shoes Sell Out In Under 40 Minutes
Reebok's limited-edition Aliens shoes sold out after 38 minutes this morning.
The shoes, which are modeled after those worn by Sigourney Weaver's 'Ripley' in Aliens, were available on Reebok's website for $175 from 9am PT.
Apparently many users had site errors and issues with checkout, too.
@Reebok had the Aliens in my cart since 9am but checkout is looping. Don't wanna lose these cause of your site error pic.twitter.com/j57dobXek7
Game of Thrones Actor on the Wildlings’ Role in Season 6
Full spoilers for Game of Thrones through its Season 6 premiere, "The Red Woman," continue below.
Where do the Wildlings stand in Westeros now that Jon Snow is dead? With the majority of the Night's Watch out for Wildling blood and the Wildlings newly south of the Wall, Tormund Giantsbane is aware that his people don't have many allies.
"His objective has always been to find safety for his people," Kristofer Hivju told me during a recent interview. "In the beginning, the White Walkers were the biggest threat, but now the threat is from all sides. They've never been very popular anywhere. You have the Night's Watch, and then you have things happening in the north. Nobody -- nobody -- has any affection for us. So we came from one place to another horrible place."
The A-Z of the Alien Franchise
This feature was originally published prior to the theatrical release of Prometheus.
A new Alien movie is coming! Alien: Covenant will be released next week, taking another bunch of poor suckers out into space where no one can hear them scream. So we figured this was a great time to once again explore the deepest, darkest corners of the galaxy with our unmissable alphabetical guide to the Alien franchise.
And be sure to read our review of Alien: Covenant once you're done here! Spoilers follow for the series (aside from Covenant)...
The New Call of Duty Has a Title
This year's installment in the Call of Duty series will be called Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare.
The title could briefly be found on an empty entry on the US PS Store on PS4, at the top of the Trending section - it has since been removed. Here's a screenshot:
The PS Store entry for Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare.
Earlier today, a leak suggested the new game from series veterans Infinity Ward would be revealed by next week.
The Flash Slows Down This Week
How do you continue The Flash without The Flash? That’s the question facing Barry Allen (Grant Gustin) and his friends on the CW series after the events of last week’s episode in Tuesday night's new episode, "Back to Normal."
As executive producer Andrew Kreisberg notes, “Barry and the team are dealing with the fact that Barry doesn't have his powers anymore.”
Kreisberg remarked that taking Barry’s speed away actually gave them a chance to do a relatively calmer episode, explaining, “You know, we've been going at such a breakneck pace. I know the TV scheduling put a couple of arbitrary stops in there, but if you think about it going from the Earth-Two saga to King Shark to the Trajectory episode to the flashback episode to last week and all the revelations and Barry losing his speed, we've been pedal to the metal at a breakneck pace, and this episode where Barry loses his powers was literally designed to slow everything down and let everybody catch their breath, before the next four episodes.”
May’s Games With Gold Have Been Announced
Next month’s Games with Gold have been revealed.
Here's the list, and when you'll be able to grab your free download:
- Defense Grid 2 - May 1-31, Xbox One
- Costume Quest 2 - May 16-June 15, Xbox One
- Grid 2 - May 1-15, Xbox 360
- Peggle - May 16-31, Xbox 360
In our reviews, we gave Defense Grid 2 an 8.0 - praising its smart additions to the addictive original's formula - and Costume Quest 2 a 7.8, saying its "combat and story are both surprisingly good for an RPG that concludes in roughly a half-dozen hours".
Sherlock Holmes 3 Gets a New Writer
James Coyne will be doing a rewrite of Warner Bros' Sherlock Holmes 3.
This news comes via Deadline. Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law will be returning as Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, and Guy Ritchie is back on board to direct.
Coyne worked on adaptation of Treasure Island for Sherlock producer Lionel Wigram last year, which appeared on 2015's Black List for unproduced screenplays. Originally, Iron Man 3 writer Drew Pearce was on script duty for the film back in 2011.
13 Movies Worth Watching on Steam Right Now
This week, Valve made over 100 Lionsgate films available to rent and stream through its Steam client.
More and more movies will be added to the line-up "as the partnership continues to expand worldwide," but for now, here are 13 movies from the existing catalog that are worth watching on Steam right now.
Mad Max: Fury Road redefined action movie standards last year with its expertly choreographed, adrenaline-fueled chase sequences, stunning practical effects, and incredibly detailed art direction, taking home six Academy Awards for its achievements.
Severed Review
Drinkbox Studios' games all share a unique, rather dark sense of humor and very distinctive artistic flare. With Severed, the studio has turned its attention to classic first-person dungeon crawling, and the result is a creative touch-screen adventure with sharp, colorful graphics that mask an incredibly dark center.
Severed places you in the role of Sasha. Her home burned, her family taken, and her left-arm severed, she wakes up to find everything she loves destroyed. When a mysterious and frightful vision bestows her with a living sword that sucks up power by severing limbs, Sasha ventures forth into a nightmarish maze in search of a resolution.
While Severed is heavily influenced by classic dungeon crawlers, it’s not exactly an RPG. Sasha doesn’t have traditional stats that increase throughout the game. Instead, you use the body parts collected during combat--and occasionally find strewn about the environment--as currency to buy or upgrade abilities, which include increased damage and health, the ability to leech health from enemies, or a longer window of time to sever limbs during combat, to name a few. Each new ability and piece of armor Sasha earns by killing a boss has its own upgrade tree, so there’s a good amount of depth to the customization system overall. If you prefer to rely on straightforward sword-slashing, you can focus heavily on that skill tree, but there's plenty of room to experiment with Sasha's repertoire of equipment and abilities.
Fighting consists of swiping over enemies to attack or to parry incoming attacks in real time, but within that basic framework, Drinkbox has created a rewarding system where every move counts as you seek to collect body parts for new upgrades. Monsters' attacks are tied to a cooldown timer, and you can successfully counter them by swiping toward an attacking appendage. When done successfully, this will open monsters up to consecutive attacks. Facing a monster one-on-one is usually not a problem, but Severed doesn’t make it that easy—the game frequently throws three or four monsters at you at once. This means you have to keep a very close watch on the timer for each monster and shift your focus accordingly in order to attack and defend at the right time.
Timing is everything in Severed: the only way to collect body parts is to fill your sever meter by consistently attacking without being blocked, and, by parrying incoming attacks. Screwing up your timing or the angle of your swipe may lead to a blocked attack, which in turn prevents your meter from filling up. You may still win the fight, but you will walk away empty-handed. Combat can quickly become a hectic, even stressful affair. Thankfully, there are no random encounters here. Severed lets you know where the monsters are with a glowing flame in the room ahead. There’s also no real penalty to dying in the normal difficulty level.
Severed's map bears more than a passing resemblance to Metroid-style games. The overall world is quite large, but the meat of the game is figuring out how to reach new, tucked away areas. Much like Metroid, this is usually done by defeating a boss and earning a new ability. Sasha can learn how to change the land from day to night and back again to open special doors, for instance.
This is a world that takes you through spooky forests, forgotten temples, fiery wastelands, and more in Sasha’s quest to find her family. The landscapes are equally dreamlike and nightmarish, with bizarre plant growths and areas defined by isolation and ruin. There’s an intriguing use of organic shapes and objects throughout. A giant skull might be resting along a forest path, and within the dungeons, the actual doors are frequently living creatures—scary, toothsome maws that open when given the right object. At one point, you’ll go through a living door, only to find it’s still connected to an actual creature—some huge, worm-like thing that produces foul toxic gas. The whole world of Severed is full of strange sights that make it worthwhile to comb every inch of its multi-level maps.
Severed starts out deceptively simplistic and bizarre. The weird, old-school scrolling method and touch-based interactions hide a remarkably deep and involving mix of action, adventure, and role-playing. The more hours you pour into Severed, the more complex it becomes and the darker the story gets. It takes a while to grasp, but once the game picks up steam, it becomes an intriguing experience that's unlike any other game on Vita to date.