Valkyria Chronicles is a squad oriented, turn-based strategy game with a big narrative emphasis and a strong anime style. It’s daring in some ways in its narrative, but not quite daring enough. Regardless, it’s an engaging game and well worth sitting through the cut-scenes for.

Valkyria takes place in an alternative Europe and an alternative World War II. In this world your small nation, which seems to be an analogue for Holland or Belgium, is independent of the two opposed forces which are beginning their clash across this world’s Europe. Your nation, Gallia, is invaded by the Imperial Alliance in a blitzkreig and Gallia’s citizen soldiers – including your team – are rapidly deployed to try and blunt the advance and secure Gallian independence from both the Imperials and the overtures of their enemies, the Atlantic Federation, a force that isn’t above being manipulative and underhanded in their prosecution of war either.

God, fucking DAMN but Damn Simmons is a lot of hard work to read. I thought Ilium/Olympus was a hard read and that was an advance on the density of Hyperion. He’s hard work to read but in a good way, he makes you think and he’s dense with references to classical (in both senses) literature. Where Hyperion and Ilium call back to more ancient works, Drood calls back to the Victorian writings of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins as well as the obsessions, strengths and weaknesses of both men, woven together with a thread of the supernatural (?) obsessions of the times.

For me, at least, this was a book about what’s real and what’s fiction, about the inevitable jealousy that exists between even great creative individuals if one perceives the other as being even greater or one gets more attention than another from the public or feels that they are being overlooked.

Fallout 3 was a giant, radioactive monster of a game, an awesome game that was SO awesome that we could forgive it many of its flaws and drawbacks simply because the awesomeness factor was so strong that they didn’t matter. We didn’t CARE if the game crashed the console every so often or if you couldn’t get to the boat to Point Lookout because the level wouldn’t load properly, because we wanted to play so very much it gave us boners that could double as battering rams. We forgave it its sins.

Second time around we, or at least I, are not as liable to be so forgiving. Especially if many of the flaws and errors of the game are the same ones that dogged our experience with Fallout 3. We sort of expect them to be fixed or, at least, for the same flaws, errors and bugs not to show up this time around, given that they were patched in Fallout 3 and that this is a ‘whole new game’ which has had more time to finesse the engine and iron out the issues.

China Mieville is one of my favourite authors and has energised the alternative/urban fantasy or the ‘New Weird’ for me as much as Peter F Hamiltion re-energised British science fiction for me. I wasn’t so keen on The City & The City but his Bas Lag novels and his somewhat similarly themed children’s book Un-Lun-Dun are acts of pre-meditated brilliance. Kraken lacks the pure and unadulterated awesomeness of Perdidot Street Station but is much better and more engaging than The City & The City and closer in theme to King Rat, somewhere between that and the Bas-Lag novels in terms of wierdness. Comparisons with the last book I reviewed, Into the Nightside, are likely to be inevitable in the course of this review.

The Last Remnant is a tactical RPG by Square-Enix and that comes with a weight of expectation. Last Remnant doesn’t disappoint on these stakes, though it is a little unpolished. Coming out of playing through Final Fantasy XIII this game feels like a dry run in many ways, the theme of powerful, unknowable machines and whether they’re being used or using the people around them and, system-wise, taking a great deal of control away from the player and putting it in the hands of automation.

Hopefully writer Warren Ellis needs no introduction, his body of work and his relentless internet presence should make him known to just about anyone with a remote interest in comics or internet culture. He has an impressive body of comics work, perhaps most notably Transmetropolitan and the initial work on The Authority. Planetary takes place within the context of the Wildstorm universe, but is very much its own ‘creature’.

For me this is Ellis’ magnum opus, delayed, beset by problems and an irregular schedule of releases Planetary is a triumph over adversity. Essentially the books are a product of the millennium, ten years in completion but while those themes have somewhat passed by, the books have remained fresh in part due to Ellis’ constant forward thinking and in part due to the recent success of semi-rebooted comic book films and other re-examinations of the genre.

Unlucky for some, Final Fantasy XIII is the first proper third-gen installment in the Final Fantasy series and it’s a divisive one that’s been the cause of some controvery. It’s a big departure from the previous games in the series and from many of the gameplay conventions of JRPGs and RPGs in general. It’s also virtually incomprehensible and requires a big investment of time to get to the full ‘whack’ of the game.

If you’re a fan of the pulps then the prospect of a decent rocket-pack game set in the 1930s will have you squeeing with glee. Indeed I can’t remember a rocket pack game since the Atari ST and so, despite all the reviews warning about Darkvoid I caved in and purchased it – albeit preowned for only a tenner. Unfortunately, this isn’t the game pulp fans have been waiting for though there are the seeds of a potential, good pulp or rocket-pack game contained within this disappointing effort.

While Darkvoid does have a story it’s something of a confused mix of David Icke lizard-conspiracy, fascism, Bermuda Triangle disappearances and vague mysticism.

I’m a sucker for pulp and I’m a sucker for steampunk. These are factors which often lead me to buy things, read things and play things that I’m otherwise not so sure about. Sometimes that leads me to find hidden gems, sometimes it means I play awful games because I’ve been suckered in by a love of genre. Damnation falls somewhere in the middle, in no way is it as much of a disappointment as Dark Void was but it’s still a little confused and doesn’t shine like it could.

In this world the American Civil War went on for much longer than in real history and ended up smashing the USA into numerous different, smaller states.

Simon R Green (Whose name, for some reason always makes me think of I.R. Baboon) is the writer of the Deathstalker and Shaman Bond book series which are notable for their over-the-top action and rat-tat-tat pacing. Into the Nightside follows pretty much the same model as these other books although it is, ostensibly, set in a mirror of our own London, the eponymous ‘Nightside’ of the title. This book collects the first two stories of The Nightside ‘Something From the Nightside’ and ‘Agents of Light’.

Who can’t love a comic book about a vengeful Brit taking the piss out of and then beating the living crap out of arrogant Americans? You just know with Garth Ennis involved it’s going to be gloriously juvenile, violent and grotesque with more serious undertones for those who choose to look for them. Of course, this kind of subversion of the superhero genre has been done before by Millar, Ennis, Moore and many others. Those others haven’t been quite so… explicit or crude, more intellectual but they’ve also tended to tackle it head on, on equal terms. In this case we’re backing the underdog, the cunning, vicious, nasty, squalid little underdog and – as a Brit – that’s how we like it.

I don’t really understand why I like Robin Hobb. I tend to dislike traditional fantasy almost on reflex and her writings are almost (but not quite) regular fantasy. I also tend to dislike writing where the heroes are helpless, tortured or at the mercy of outside forces. I prefer empowered heroes and Hobbs protaganists almost always seem to be at the mercy of outside forces and to take a severe drubbing at the hands of the world around them. Nonetheless, I still like the books and it’s a source of consternation to me that I carry on reading despite my distaste at the tortures that her characters undergo. Hobb’s novels are fantasy ‘misery tourism’, they often leave you feeling sad and upset but the worlds are well realised and if the characters weren’t well written they wouldn’t tug at your heart-strings.

As a sequel to Bioshock, one of the best story-shooters to have come out in recent years, Bioshock 2 had a lot to live up to. A good combination of biting political satire, excellent gameplay and superb atmosphere the original Bioshock set a standard almost impossibly high to meet and, while Bioshock 2 makes an heroic effort to equal its predecessor, it falls somewhat short of equaling that goal.

Eight years after the events of Bioshock where Andrew Ryan, the founder of Rapture (the undersea city where Bioshock is set) a psychologist, Doctor Sofia Lamb, has taken over the city, winning the civil war that has taken place between the factions in the fractured city. In contrast to Andrew Ryan’s ‘Objectivist’ outlook, modeled on Ayn Rand’s adolescent philosophy of selfishness, Sofia Lamb presents a sort of biological/psychological Communism as an alternative for the dispossessed and lost of Ryan’s utopia.

Heroquest 2 is the non-Gloranthan version of Heroquest, the next iteration of the system by Robin Laws and one designed to be more generic, usable for any setting and any sort of game. Heroquest is meant to be a story game, not only in the sense that the system is supposed to encourage story, but that the way the game is supposed to be played is AS a story, rather than a game.

As a generic game system release, there’s no specific background per se to the game but it does – inevitably – reference Glorantha quite heavily as well as a few game settings of its own devices. These are only used as examples and are never fully developed and – aside from Glorantha – they’re a rather eclectic mix.

Another sequel and another one with a lot to live up to. Mass Effect 2 was, somewhat, overshadowed by the release of the hotly anticipated Dragon Age: Origins. While ME2 is a solid sequel much as with my review of Bioshock 2 I felt a sense of mild disappointment – not that this stopped me playing it all the way through quite rapidly. ME2 is a solid game and is, in my opinion, superior to the more lauded and praised Dragon Age, perhaps due to the fact that Science Fiction is a more free and wide-ranging genre without the similar sort of strictures and expectations – even demands – that the fantasy genre has.

The game opens with a hell of a kicker, the Normandy investigating missing vessels and encountering an enormous and deadly vessels that cuts clean through her defenses and destroys the ship, including – apparently – killing Shepherd, the main character. Given that you’ve just imported your old game details that’s a bit of a fright. Fortunately, that’s not the end of it.

The story is a bit of a casualty to the mission structure and game play to start with, though threads emerge and little plot arcs with the various ‘quest givers’ do emerge. The information about Pandora is there to understand its background but you really have to pay attention as you whisk through the missions to really get an idea of what happened.

Pandora was a mining world run by one of the big interstellar corporations until they decided to pull out. In so doing they left behind a bunch of convict workers and everyone who couldn’t afford to get off world. The injured, the perverse and those who simply enjoyed exploiting a frontier planet. Stories about the vault have brought other mercenaries here, along with members of larger mercenary forces, ostensibly there to keep the peace. A job they fail at.

This review is unlikely to be of a great deal of use to most people who will have seen the word ‘Bioware’ associated with it, ignored the EA also associated with it, had a happy accident in their pants and bought it anyway. For those of you who’ve been a little bit slower off the mark or have hung back unsure whether to buy it, without having the money spare or who are curious without being curious enough to spend money, hopefully this will offer something useful.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, Dragon Age: Origins is the kick off of a new CRPG franchise for Bioware, divorced from their D&D associations (Baldur’s Gate) and that of their old game engine. Dragon’s Age has been sold as a glorious, sexy, blood-spattered romp that tears down preconceptions about fantasy games and worlds, plays about with them and offers a more mature and visceral entertainment ‘sausage’ at the end of it all.

Wolfsheim is a mini-adventure for Scion, stand alone, suitable for an evening’s play or as a pick-up or convention game, though it will need experienced characters to be pre-generated in such an instance. It’s fairly straightforward, if a little rail-roady (as most of these adventures from White Wolf have been) and it could easily be shifted in space and time from its modern, Germanic setting to just about anywhere or anywhen.

The basic storyline is that of Yojimbo, the famous Japanese samurai story, a town caught between two predatory groups and the wanderers coming in, upsetting the balance between the people and their antagonists and, hopefully, causing a new peace to come about (through a great deal of bloodshed in the middle).

MSG™ Executive Edition is a satirical RPG about what I shall reservedly term ‘Corporate marketing bollocks’ and the rat race. Players take on the roles of company representatives, ‘reps’ and each turn The Company (the role of which shifts between players) tries to crush the players or get them to crush each other. Yes, it’s one of those new-wave poncey indie games under the thick shell of satire and piss-taking. In spite of that, for an indie game, it’s a fairly weighty 130+ pages.

MSG™ Executive Edition is a story-focussed, semi-GMless, resource management and risk assessment oriented indie game. That’s a torrent of buzzwords that wouldn’t be out of place in the game itself. To clarify…

This is a fairly rules-light game thereby focusing more intently on the story and drama, rather than complex rules mechanics.

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough

Part Four of the Scion companion is ‘Secrets of the World’ which is a rather grandiose name for what amounts to a grab bag of things that didn’t really fit into the other sections. This is the fourth in a series of ‘peeks’ at the Scion Companion which is coming to print to support the main line and is much mroe general – and therefore generally useful – than some of the other previews.

This is a toolkit of ideas, devices, groups and guidelines and as such represents the real ‘meat’ of the Scion Companion. If this is what you like from your supplementary material than buying just this companion on PDF could represent a real bargain if the other sections of the book don’t appeal so much.

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough