14 DAY TRIAL // Andrei Dumitrescu: My gaming drug of choice for the weekend will be Civilization V, the new turn based strategy title from Sid Meier, Jon Shafer and the team at Firaxis.
It's very hard to explain the appeal of the new Civilization to someone who is new to the series but it's certainly linked to the huge amount of options in nation building, research and cultural development that the game offers, all of them attracting and worth exploring.
And the biggest surprise with Civilization V is that the developers working on it really managed to create an experience that is totally different from the previous one in the series, resisting the temptation to only expand on a very successful model.
The change I like best at the moment is the Culture mechanics, which is now more important than ever determining both the spatial expansion of one's civilization through tile acquisition and the way it shapes it's destiny via the new Policy tech trees, which allow more customization than in previous games but also install a few basic values early on that are hard to change as the game goes ahead.
One word of advice: beware of the military of Gandhi. The guy seems very eager for modern weapons and is not afraid to use some nukes when things get complicated.
Andrei Dobra: This weekend will probably still be filled with the PC edition of Darksiders, as the last few puzzles are extremely tricky and require a lot of trial and error.
Even if I consider myself a pretty smart guy, the things conceived by the designers at Vigil Games are a bit too hard for their own sake.
I'd much rather try my luck with thousands of enemies than be faced another devious puzzle made by these guys.
Besides Darksiders, Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light will definitely steal some of my time in the next two days.
The fun isometric point of view, the relatively tame puzzles (in comparison to Darksiders) and the fact that I can play co-op with a friend make this title one of the best ones featuring the attractive tomb raider in recent times.
Throw in the extra challenges and the pretty big environments filled with secrets, and you've got a recipe to keep me hooked.