Call Of Juarez: The Cartel, PC, PS3 & Xbox 360
Call Of Juarez and its portentously named prequel, Bound In Blood, followed the McCall brothers as they carved a path of violence across the wild west.
Although their descendants feature in Call Of Juarez: The Cartel, this modern-day story of cops v drug dealers feels disconnected from the series that preceded it in both subject matter and approach. Selecting one of three characters (a wearisome clutch of gratuitously swearing ex-special forces/FBI/LAPD caricatures) the emphasis is on co-operative play, with your two buddies backing you up. Offline, you'll find they tend to lag behind, leading to toe-tapping while they amble up to a checkpoint you reached some time ago. Plot exposition is laboured and surprisingly lengthy given that it's just a flimsy excuse to go and shoot drug pedlars, while everything from misfiring set-pieces to typos in the subtitles point to a game that has been trotted out with very little love.
Ubisoft, £32.89-£44.99
Ms Splosion Man, Xbox Live Arcade
Ms Splosion Man was a puzzle and platform game in which the protagonist blew himself up to jump, kill enemies and activate switches. Ms Splosion Man has pink lipstick and a big bow, but apart from that it's combustible business as usual, meaning repeated self-immolations are again your route to glory. One explosion sends Ms Splosion Man into the air and she can trigger two more while airborne, allowing you to bridge larger gaps or reach power-ups. There are also neon-lit rails to grind, colourful cannons to blast you towards your next destination, and sections that involve hopping between moving hover cars while endeavouring not to destroy them. There's a sprinkling of giant bosses and the game is shot through with hit-and-miss humour. Although there are moments of frustration, this is an elegant and carefully paced challenge with a multiplayer mode that's almost its own discrete game.
Twisted Pixel, 800 Microsoft Points (£6.80)
Games news
Reefer Madness, the seventh and final piece of downloadable content for superb detect 'em-up LA Noire , is now available …
iPod, iPad and iPhone owners will notice things at Apple's App Store aren't quite as cheap as they used to be, with software that was formerly 59p now costing 69p and £1.19 titles going up to £1.49 …
Meanwhile, significantly larger figures have been exchanged as loss-making games giant Electronic Arts bought maker of the world's finest casual games PopCap (famed for Bejewelled and the awesome Plants vs Zombies) for an eye-watering $1.3bn …
Ubisoft has announced that many of its future games will require Uplay Passport, a system designed to lock online multiplayer modes for anyone purchasing a game secondhand unless they buy a one-off £10 online pass …
And the highly anticipated public beta test of Call Of Duty: Elite goes live this week.
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jul/23/this-weeks-new-games
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