PixlBit

Another year, another Skylanders game.

Three years later and the Skylanders craze is still in full swing. From kids to adults, it seems that everyone loves collecting and playing with these colorful characters. The latest iteration of the series brings a new wrinkle to the toys as well as to the game, but neither truly changes the tried-and-true formula. Platforming mechanics add a bit more depth to the traversal and combat mechanics, while the swap ability makes it a bit more fun to play with the physical toys by mixing and matching tops and bottoms. There’s no doubt that the whole kit is quite nifty, but as a game, Skylanders Swap Force still leaves something to be desired.

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Square-Enix gives us an online hack-n-slash experience unlike anything we've seen before on a Nintendo handheld.

Nintendo’s struggles with their online strategy (if you can call it that) are widely known and widely reviled.  We’ve seen some slight improvements as the years click by, but it looks like Square-Enix might be the ones to teach the big N how to really do things right on the 3DS with Heroes of Ruin.  Square-Enix and design house n-Space picked the perfect sort of game to leverage the online functionality of the 3DS – a dungeon crawler.  Keeping far away from the frame-by-frame criticality of an FPS or fighting game, a game in the vein of Diablo should let Nintendo’s network stretch its legs without really angering the hardcore twitch gamers.  Although already released in Europe, Heroes of Ruin doesn’t launch in North America until July 17^th, and the online multiplayer is just one aspect that has us sharpening our swords in anticipation.

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So much action even Michael Bay feels overwhelmed.

I honestly didn’t see how Treyarch could have kept their promise that the next Call of Duty game, Black Ops, would have more action than the previous two Modern Warfare games. After all, people can only see so many nukes go off before it starts to seem mundane; however, I think even Michael Bay would have to take a breather while playing this game. In spite of all Activision’s recent troubles, Blacks Ops ensures that Call of Duty will continue to be a video game goliath, stomping through gamers’ hearts and minds.

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