I didn't really have high hopes for BioWare's foray into the crowded MMOG field — I've consistently tried out most releases since WoW came out so many millions of players ago and the results have ranged from interesting to boring, but never long-lasting. It wasn't that SWTOR itself was particularly bad, but if it hadn't been for the discovery of Flashpoints shortly after leaving the starting area I might have walked away from the game thinking it nothing more than pretty cut-scenes framing "kill ten rats" quests.

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At its heart, Duke Nukem Forever is a first person shooter that basks in its own heritage, more interested in reminding the player of how awesome Duke is — and by extension, the series itself — rather than providing any new reason to think so. "I'm amazing because I think I am" is the motto of 2011's Duke, and Gearbox's implementation seems more interested in being offensive for the sake of it than for any sense of funny.

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The "Defence of the Ancients" genre has exploded in recent history, inspired in part by highly successful spin-off titles such as League of Legends. In turn developed by some of the people involved in the original Warcraft 3 custom map, "LoL" has won a number of prestigious awards and boasts a userbase in the millions. I first tested a review beta of it back in September 2009 and while my initial impressions were not at all favourable, a few months ago I started playing it again out of curiosity at its immense success given the lacklustre experience I had originally.

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Epic Games' Unreal Engine has been the backbone for a ridiculous number of titles. At Apple's music event Wednesday, they announced an upcoming action-RPG titled Project Sword that would finally put Vice President Mark Rein's comments that devices like the iPad had the same graphics capabilities as consoles to the test. Epic has certainly had a lot of nice things to say for the iPad, calling it the "console of the future," but until now it's been hard to see them quantify that comment with concrete examples.

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Steam announced yesterday that they had partnered up with Prima, long the purveyor of official "strategy guides" for games like Mass Effect 2 and Prince of Persia, to offer downloadable versions of their guides through Valve's platform. At first glance I liked this idea a lot, but after buying one of them it seemed like a waste of money.

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drone is a short freebie game by David Wilson. Mixing ideas, drone is a hybrid top-down shooter combined with a tower defence game in a way that works really well. Your character is a little sprite, the titular "drone," who has to kill enemies to collect money– this money is used to finance the weapons and ammo you need to go on and kill bigger and badder enemies. However, there's more than one way to play the game.

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When it comes to multiplayer death-match games, the typical goal is to avoid getting killed for as long as possible, taking out hostile players along the way. You run around closed maps collecting power ups and avoiding your enemies, sneaking up on them to kill them before they can kill you. Plain Sight, a new indie release by Beatnik Games (available now on Steam and other digital-distribution retailers), takes this traditional concept and twists it around to create an innovative experience– instead of avoiding death, the objective is to suicide yourself on your own terms in your own time.

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