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New Releases for The Week of Stars and Shadows

New Releases for The Week of Stars and Shadows


Shad’O is a tower defense game with a unique story and some interesting mechanics. Most prominently, the game doesn’t take place in a physical space. The real action of the game goes on inside the mind of a nine-year-old boy. Something terrible has happened to William—he’s unsure of where he is or how he got there, but he’s locked inside his own mind, and his memories are under assault by a mysterious dark fog. If he’s to have any hope of remembering the events that brought him here, he’ll have to fend off the fog, and for that, he has a series of spells and ‘companions’ (towers) to aid him in pushing back, and ultimately defeating the dark force. Along the way, he’s able to access the valued memories, learning more about the mystery of his condition. In a field of Tower Defense games which are usually very light in theme, the game seems particularly heavy and dark. As for the gameplay itself, it’s mostly your typical tower defense stuff—it’s a set course with your towers on the curb (so no mazing the enemy), and your towers are destructible with attacks from the enemy forces, so awareness of the towers becomes one of your priorities. The boy’s psyche is represented on the battlefield of each memory with a pajama-wearing avatar. He can cast various spells to attack the enemies and boost or heal his towers, but he’s limited by the fog, which begins each level tight around his memory’s core and must be pushed back by the building of the towers.


Mark of the Ninja is a highly stylized 2D adventure game with lots of stealth elements. The player controls a ninja on a series of missions which require lots of hiding in the shadows, setting traps, and sneaking up on guards. Various gameplay elements accentuate this, including dynamic lighting and line-of-sight mechanics that affect detection, weapons of various silence, tools of distraction, easy wall-climbing, a variety of hiding places, and Assassin’s Creed-esque kill-moves from those hiding places. Guards can also just be pummeled with swords and throwing stars, but death from the shadows is so much more fun.

Following is a full list of this week’s announced North American releases:

Windows

  • Knight Age
  • Shad’O

3DS

  • Balloon Pop Remix

 Xbox 360

  • Dogfight 1942
  • Mark of the Ninja
  • ezmuze+ 2.0

PS3

  • ZEN Pinball 2

Vita

  • ZEN Pinball 2

Comments

  1. primesuspect
    primesuspect Shad'O looks awesome.
  2. midga
    midga Shad'O looks interesting. I always end up not playing my TD stuff, though...
  3. Theironhand
    Theironhand As always CB you pick the best games, I'll have to try that Shad'O.

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