HOARD is a reverse tower defense game.  You play as a town-terrorizing, loot-nabbing, princessnapping dragon and must defend your ill-gotten gains.  Meanwhile, the countryside builds up its defenses: towns train archers, knights flock to the kingdom, and wizards build dragon-destroying towers.  You compete against time and other dragons to build the biggest bed of coins.

HOARD succeeds on a few levels.  It’s fast-paced, features a smooth-yet-challenging difficulty curve, and is light-hearted enough to keep me grinning without being annoying.  The maps are all interesting and challenging, and the modes provide a ton of variety.

HOARD has some problems.  The AI has different personalities, but they’re randomly determined before each game, with no way to choose them.  This can lead to the AI ignoring objectives, doing its own thing, and losing horribly.  There’s also a cursor-related bug, where the game doesn’t isolate mouse-clicks, causing gameplay hiccups and stuck keys.  

Neither complaint has kept me from playing, though.  I still haven’t gold medaled any of the levels, which I like; it means you have to earn them.  That taps into a primeval part of my brain, and will keep me coming back.  Plus, multiplayer looks very promising.  Give HOARD’s demo a try.

I received both MLB 2K11 and MLB 11: The Show in the mail recently, and after a couple hours with each, I’ve concluded that no one knows how to make a sports game for the casual player anymore.  If you’re new to either of these franchises, you’ll need to devote hours to figuring out what the hell is going on.  Pick up and play just proves frustrating.

On the plus side, both games look pretty.  2K11 has a slick, TV-style presentation, impressive stadiums, and butt-ugly players and animations.  The Show’s players are better looking, the animations are fluid and realistic, but the presentation feels dated and tired in comparison.

If you’re doing anything either than pitching or batting, the controls are obtuse and poorly explained, with little helpful feedback.  The Show solves this by controlling every other aspect of the game by default, while 2K11 lets you suffer.

Early on, 2K11 earns the nod for pitching and batting.  I grok the “motion-controlled” pitching they have going on.  Players hold the right-analog stick in a specific direction to charge the power of a pitch, then make a motion—sweep around for a curveball, a straight shot ahead for a fastball—that determines the accuracy of the pitch.  At bat, pressing the right stick up is a contact swing; back then up is a power swing; left or right is a defensive swing.

The Show has three different pitching modes: press X once, use a power bar (like a golf swing), or use the analog stick.  The power bar and analog stick were too difficult to wrap my head around quickly, while the single button press seemed to determine your pitch location entirely at random.

I can only assume that The Show allows for more player control over pitches, but that was never explained anywhere.  Practice drills exist in both games, but The Show gave very little useful feedback, while 2K11 features very few drills with no retry option, making them incredibly frustrating.

For pure gameplay, I would rather play 2K11, but the package surrounding the gameplay is convoluted, confusing, and annoying.  No favorite team? Really? I like the 2K11’s integration of MLB Today.  I like The Show’s huge variety of game modes.  Unfortunately, 2K11 is a frustrating experience, and I feel like I need to spend several hours researching The Show.  As someone new to both franchises, neither game hooked me.

Reaching two hours in MindJack was difficult.  The gameplay is dull.  The story is incomprehensible.  The level designs are boring.  The dialogue is representative of the “best” of the early Resident Evils.  All of which is disappointing because MindJack has some interesting ideas.

First, you can jump in and out of various innocent bystanders’ minds, commandeering them to fight for you.  The trouble is, nothing changes when you jump into a new body.  If unarmed, the mindjackee materializes a gun out of thin air, and the enemy immediately recognizes you as a threat, ruining any stealthy options.  No special abilities. No new ways to overcome obstacles.  Just another body for the firefight. 

Also interesting, you can open up your game, allowing others to jump in and fight for or against you, gaining experience as you progress.  Unfortunately, I never felt like I was playing a well-crafted single-player game, but rather a series of random multiplayer maps with some terrible connecting dialogue.

The gameplay is passable, and could be enjoyable if the story was compelling, but it’s not.  Yahtzee explains why better than I can here. I’ll just say skip this one.  MindJack didn’t deserve the two hours I gave it.