This week, I took a moment to review Sonic Free Riders on the Xbox 360.

You can catch a sample of the review here…

Having picked up the Kinect and subsequently Free Riders recently, I decided to give it a go and see how it felt. Generally, the game is very good, for something that was apparantly made within 6 months. But there are a few niggling issues that are very obvious.

The biggest of these being that while in the middle of a race, it can jump onto a pause menu, which then leads onto the frustration of losing your current in game pose while you either try to physically continue, or even verbally continue. Loosing your stance midgame is one of those highly crucial things that can make or break a race.

Other niggling items revolve around the innacuracy of the Kinect movements. The issues are more noticeable on bends in the actual raceways, as it doesn’t always pick up body bends for the game to notice. Although a player can adjust to these, and make further adjustments, it requires larger playing spaces, which is one of the Kinect’s general downfalls.

As usual, you can find the review in it’s entirety here at Radio SEGA

Last week, I updated you folks with a review I performed back in April on Spiral Knights. this week, however, I took a more updated look at the game by Three Rings and SEGA.

So, what has happened in the realm of the Clockworks in the last 4 months?

Recently, we have had the official announcement of a million players on Spiral Knights, which, I imagine quite a few of those have come from the also recent Steam partnership.

Slightly prior to that, we had the first new low-tier boss addition in the form of the Snarbolax, which is great fun, and a really good introduction to specific tactics used for bosses for low-tier players.

We have also seen the inclusion of the in-game auction house, which if you’ll notice, is one of the things I felt was one of Spiral Knights’ flaws at the time. Talking to some of the older SK players, some feel, that the auction house has taken slightly away from the community feel of trading, which, it does, to an extent, but then, it allows those players, who don’t like to talk openly with strangers, to actually help themselves in the game. Overall, I think it is still an overall improvement to it’s in-game economy structure as well.

More recently, after the Steam partnership, we have had the new Tier 2 boss of the Roarmulus Twins. Which, I personally, have managed to defeat for the first time quite recently, and it was a REALLY good boss encounter. The levels prior to it, are slightly overtuned, and even the slightest bit of lag can hamper getting through there solo, but as a party group, theres definately some extra margin. But overall, it’s really fun, which is the most important thing.

You can read the rest of this follow-up review here, and remember you can check out all other reviews done by the Radio SEGA review team on the site as well!

A while back, while doing reviews for Radio SEGA, I did a small review of Spiral Knights a little while after it’s release back in it’s infant days. upon reflection and considering it’s considered to be a “MMO” game (Massivly Multiplayer Online, for those of you not in the know).

Considering that there have been several updates to the game in general, including two low-tier bosses, and more recently a Player vs Player arena type option, I felt like a link to the previous review I had once done for Radio SEGA before I take an updated look and do a re-review of how I believe, in my opinion, the game now stands.

Spiral Knights is a “Free-to-Play Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game”. Developed by Three Rings Design and published by SEGA.

A free-to-play MMO, doesn’t really appeal to me at a perspective off the bat, mainly due to the fact I will know, from experience that it will cost some monetary in-game item. But with this in mind, I hooked up with Capn Cloudchaser and The Tall Guy, and we set about discovering the wonder of what Spiral Knights had to offer.

Jumping headlong in, the character creation screen offers few choices, but enough to get a semi-unique look to get you started. So after spending a few minutes finding something that looked decent and grabbing a name, our newly created hero finds themselves thrust headlong into our tutorial level to learn how to move and attack.

Now, while the tutorial doesn’t show and tell you everything off the bat, you do learn enough to get started. Which is always good in any game. Learn by doing, and you do quite well. Get introduced to some starter enemies, and then proceed thusly into your first town. Where, by talking to some of the ever-present NPC’s you learn about your vendors and also, some lore about the game and area itself.

Your next area, is the intermission “training area” between this hub and your main hub staging areas, and the main thing this part of the tutorial teaches you is the party system. Unlike some other MMO’s, you don’t form your parties in the hub worlds and more when going to your dungeon areas. Now for your tutorial dungeon, you can complete it solo, or you can form and gather a party as you go, when you get into the “main” dungeons you can form your parties from your friends list and guild, which is what we did, and while talking over Skype had a fun time of it as well.

There are a few limitations to just constantly dungeon running though, each floor you trek in requires a cost of 10 energy. Now overly this isn’t an issue, because energy can be regained in a few ways. You can regain 1 energy every 15 minutes, and for you math buffs out there, that would make 25 hours to regain your entire energy bar. So, for something a player can generally empty in the space of 1-2 hours, takes more then a day to refill naturally, and at time of writing, I am unaware if this can happen while you are offline from the game.

You can read the rest of this review as well as many others over on the Radio SEGA forums.

Feel free to mention in the comments below about any SEGA and/or Sonic related games you’d like to see reviewed in the future!