Kill Screen Archives: Reviews

Bullish Stupidity

May 16 Reviews

The Talking Dead

The first episode of the game version of the popular comic-turned-telefilm The Walking Dead is an examination of truth-telling, silence, and testimony, which the game's dialogue forces us to grapple with at every twist 'n' turn.

May 15 Reviews

Can a Videogame Give You Closure?

Tyler Glaiel's Flash hit has blossomed into a much moodier and complicated appraisal of human existence in its PlayStation Network debut. We take a closer look at Closure and how a lot of darkness can bring a lot to light.

May 9 Reviews

Trapped in a Cage

What makes the structure of a game stay intact? We play Assassin's Creed: Revelations and find a lot of hidden walls—some more apparent than others.

May 7 Reviews

Step by Step

What's within this haunted house? And is it worth exploring with your own two feet? Jon Irwin wonders about the architecture of tedium as he explores Kinect title Haunt.

May 3 Reviews

Environmental Artist

Motorbiking in Trials Evolution isn't about speed, flips, or flails. It's an exercise in meditation on landscapes.

May 2 Reviews

There She Blows

What does Nintendo's new role-playing saga have in common with a sad, dying whale? The list spans the creature's hide.

Apr 26 Reviews

New Drivers Wanted

Twisted Metal gets another sibling in its long familial line on Playstation. Through the game's noble attempt to shephard in new players while staying loyal to fans, Lana Polansky wonders if the game needed reinvention at all.

Apr 26 Reviews

You Don't Know Jackie

Gothic shooter The Darkness II is a great exercise in comic-book style and tentacle gore, but it gets tangled up in genre fiction. Rob Zacny explains how.

Apr 25 Reviews

Where's Your Head At?

Why is Phil Fish's new puzzle game so addictive? Because it hides everything in plain sight, and lays bare the rest.

Apr 20 Reviews

Chewing the Cud

Can poetry handle Ian Bogost? Can gaming handle poetry? Tommy Rousse takes up the joystick and puts on his literature goggles to decipher A Slow Year, Bogost’s collection of game poems.

Apr 13 Reviews

Bullish Stupidity

Jeff Minter's new fruit 'em up Five a Day is profoundly stupid. Here's why it dodges skill and statistics, and goes straight to the soul.

Apr 10 Reviews

Putting Our Best Brain Forward

The way to get us to jog, apparently, is to say that zombies are coming. In Zombies, Run!, an alternate-reality game about health and fitness, Richard Clark sees a more universal experience of being convinced and feeling something real.

Apr 6 Reviews

Timeless Springfield

What do the best gags of The Simpsons lose, and gain, from being transplanted from 20-minute cuts into the potentially endless spaces of a videogame?

Apr 4 Reviews

Space Canary

Angry Birds Space shoots the birds into the stratosphere. But a larger orbit and handful of feathers feel like diminishing returns.

Mar 30 Reviews

No More Fog in Silent Hill

Is it possible to preserve classic videogames? The new rendition of the Silent Hill series shows that technology can undermine the best intentions, and old illusions are easily broken.

Mar 29 Reviews

A Kind of Gathering Panic

Two recent apps bring human beings in close contact. Runaway iOS hit Draw Something has strangers competing for bombs and profit, while Nintendo's Swapnote has more volume and humanity.

Mar 27 Reviews

What Do We Fear in Our Bodies?

Once famously justified by Freud, pop culture's fixation on human excrement is a strange phenomenon. Yannick LeJacq looks at Postal III and wonders why this has never transferred successfully to videogames.

Mar 22 Reviews

Fight! Ow, Stop!

Where do we draw the line between reality and fantasy? Richard Clark argues it's where the first punch connects with his face.

Mar 20 Reviews

The Untold Depths of Snake Eating

We can try to make sense of the sound and the fury of Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater 3D as it escalates and unravels. But maybe we don't need to.

Mar 15 Reviews

The Mass Effect Is Not What You Thought

Everything looks wrong at first about BioWare's final space opera. It turns out the makers gutted Mass Effect 3 to make it right. Here are their conclusions about humanity.

Mar 9 Reviews

Can Martian Plants Teach Us How to Wait in Line?

Waking Mars, an iPhone game about researching and growing life on Mars, has lessons in patience and persistence for the earthbound.

Mar 7 Reviews

The Longest Hate Story Ever Told

Christine Love's visual novel Analogue: A Hate Story points the way to a new literature, and a better world, while dwelling on the shortcomings on the past and present.

Mar 6 Reviews

Dear Esther, Where Do You Fit In?

The narrative experiment built on the bones of Half-Life strips away guns, glory, and even agency. What's left?

Feb 28 Reviews

The Deadly Rhythm

Jamin Warren on the myth of the dying music game. Two new games, Rhythm Heaven Fever and Beat Sneak Bandit, show that less is more—and that music games need not be about music at all.

Feb 24 Reviews

Review: Don't Play Sports With Justin Smith

Want to feel the sand between your toes and the ocean spray in your face, to hear the crowds ooh and ahh over your pirouettes in the sky? Justin Smith's Realistic Summer Sports Simulator is not your game.

Feb 17 Reviews

Review: Homeless, Gaming's Photo 101

Filipe Salgado on the independent game Homeless, which attempts to express the plight of the homeless with repeated presses of the A button. Questions remain: Why does the homeless man think he deserves to be homeless? And how did he get X-ray vision?

Feb 16 Reviews

Review: Soulcalibur V Needs to Embrace its Inner Sims

Fighting games are not exactly known for their stories, but when does a lack of a reasonable narrative become disruptive? Jordan Mammo reviews Soulcalibur V and talks about how the potentially redeeming Character Creation mode misses the mark.

Feb 14 Reviews

Review: Fishing Resort Casts a Deep Spell

Sonic the Hedgehog creator Yuji Naka continues to defy expectations with Fishing Resort, a Wii game that moves at the pace of nothing. Jon Irwin explains why watching the water poses a deeper challenge than the average game.

Feb 7 Reviews

Review: Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

The ever-popular genre of medieval role-playing continues its downward march with Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, a collaboration between game-design heavyweight Ken Rolston, fantasy luminary R.A. Salvatore, and comics auteur Todd McFarlane. Michael Thomsen finds the results less than uninspiring; they are anti-creative.

Feb 3 Reviews

Review: NFL Blitz

Regardless of one's familiarity of the game, some sports games just fall flat. Filipe Salgado paints a picture of why NFL Blitz won't have Madden worrying about competition anytime soon.

Older Features

Editors' Picks

The Archive