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Reviews
LEGO City Undercover: The Chase Begins
Rookies Only

All images are 2D representations of the 3D images.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that, despite the title, LEGO City Undercover: The Chase Begins is not a hardboiled tale about a cop taking down a criminal syndicate from the inside, and the moral struggles he willingly subjects himself to along the way. Rather, this is the story of Chase McCain – a fresh-faced policeman in a colourful, violence-free haven, whose official duties involve schlepping around to various parts of town, and volunteering to take on various odd jobs. A more appropriate title would be LEGO City: Temp Worker.

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Reviews
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow – Mirror of Fate

Often times, developers attempt to recreate the success of big console games on handheld systems. For the most part, that kind of grand scale falls flat on such small systems; but sometimes they can get it right. It’s a balancing act between epic and contained, and clearly that’s a tough thing to do. MercurySteam has attempted this kind of balance with Castlevania: Lords of Shadow – Mirror of Fate published by Konami, and in my opinion they have achieved the balance necessary to make an epic game work on a handheld system. Despite a lack of real depth, Mirror of Fate still feels like a triple A game in your hands.

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Reviews
Luigi’s Mansion
Multi-player

You can check out my write up on Luigi’s Mansion single-player here; but I recently had the chance to try out the multi-player component in Luigi’s Mansion for the 3DS. Imagine traditional dungeon crawlers mixed with Ghostbusters, that’s kind of what the multi-player is like. From the brief time that I got to spend playing it: I had a blast.

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First Impressions
Castlevania: Lord of Shadows
Mirror of Fate

Castlevania: Lord of Shadows on the console was an interesting game in the series. It changed up a lot of the core mechanics in favour of a more action-oriented experience. It was a valiant effort, but one that I felt didn’t quite hit the mark. Now, just over two years later, two new games are planned for the newly-relaunched series and hopefully they can fix what didn’t work in the first Lord of Shadows. One of the newly developed games is Castlevania: Lord of Shadows – Mirror of Fate for the 3DS. It’s the first handheld version of the relaunched series and I recently had a chance to play it – and I think that it’s a lot of fun.

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Fashionably Late Reviews
Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask

All images contained within this article are 2D versions.

Writing a review of any of Level-5′s Professor Layton games takes me a lot of time for a few reasons. For one, I take my time playing through the stories. Each Layton game has a beautifully written story, inviting the player to get lost in the world of the Professor and his companions. Secondly, I thoroughly enjoy the puzzles; so I spend a good deal of time hunting them down and finding all of the goodies hidden throughout the games. Layton and company’s latest adventure, Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask, surpasses the bar set by the previous titles, making for a wonderful gaming experience for experienced puzzlers and newbies alike!

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Reviews
LEGO The Lord of the Rings

I was very impressed by Lego Batman 2*; a solid story and great game-play (not to mention humour) all played a part in reinforcing the idea that Traveller’s Tales makes some pretty amazing games. LEGO The Lord of the Rings is further proof of that, and combines a beloved story and movie franchise with the awesomeness that is LEGO, making what I feel to be the best game in the LEGO franchise so far – one game to rule them all, you might say.

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Posted in 3DS, PC, PlayStation 3, Reviews, Vita, Xbox 360 | 2 Comments »

Reviews
Johnny Hotshot

At this point, after reviewing two UFO Interactive games in the span of a couple of months, I feel as though I know what’s going on at their studios. I feel that I understand their mindset when they make games, and I must say their hearts are in the right place. Johnny Hotshot for the 3DS is a new game by UFO Interactive, and it’s set in an arcade machine (a wild west arcade machine, to be exact). Crazy right? Johnny Hotshot takes place within the confines of the Johnny series (including Johnny Kung Fu). How does Johnny fare in the wild west? Fairly decently in fact.

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