Video Games

Like the sudden lift in temperature that tells you summer is on its way, the arrival of Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War tells you exactly what time of year it is. Developer Treyarch takes its flagship Call of Duty series to the early 1980’s, determined to bring down the iron curtain with nothing but…

The HyperX Cloud Stinger Core Wireless has one of the longer names of any headphones I’ve ever reviewed. It’s also one of the most well-appointed, no-fuss, next-gen ready gaming headsets on the market right now. HyperX is a PC peripheral maker that likes to keep things simple. It prefers clean designs, good build quality, and…

Immortals Fenyx RIsing learned a lot from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. This is not to say it should be compared to BotW — those comparisons don’t go very far and would be unfair at best. Immortals uses BotW’s mechanical trappings as a platform to say something else. It isn’t interested in a…

Age of Calamity is the latest in the Hyrule Warriors series, revolving around The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I don’t know about you, but I’ve spent the whole of 2020 waiting for more sequel news. And I’m gutted that I haven’t heard anything yet. While Age of Calamity may act as somewhat…

Inching closer to the long-awaited release of the game of the year, Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt has dropped a new taster of gameplay. The new footage features a look at PlayStation 4 Pro and PlayStation 5 versions through backwards compatibility, the 6-minute gameplay captures a section of the Nomad Lifepath, one of three playable…

We recently sat down with a number developers from the Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War team at Treyarch and Raven Software. Among them: Lead Game Designer Matt Scronce, Lead Designer on weapons, equipment and gameplay Tony Flame, and Creative Director at Raven Dan Vondrak, whose team crafted this year’s campaign. Our conversation touched…

We recently had the chance to chat to Executive Producer Erick Boenisch and Gameplay Director Mike Wang of Visual Concepts to outline some of the new modes and mechanics making their way to the next-generation build of NBA 2K21. Built from the ground up, this edition will bring with it a deeper WNBA presence in…

The Pro Evolution Soccer series has always been a personal favourite of mine, and while I love the exciting modes and interesting iterations that FIFA brings to the table, I have always admired the PES series for it’s tactical nature, and solid gameplay. eFootball PES 2021: Season Update has been aptly named, as it’s basically…

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is a game that feels like it’s a little at war with itself. The intersection of its warring Viking heroes and its lineage as a stealth-centric action title are at odds with each other. While it works hard to bridge that philosophical divide, this dissonance suffuses the entire game and ultimately weakens…

Anyone can see what Nintendo is trying to do with Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit, and for all it’s faults, the experiment feels necessary as we move forward in the gaming industry. The console wars between Xbox and PlayStation are just about to explode, and from what we’ve seen, the competition will be fiercer than…

Spider-Man is my favourite Marvel superhero, and because Miles Morales is also Spider-Man, he’s my favourite too. Miles’ first appearance was in Ultimate Fallout #4 in August 2011. Created by writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Sara Pichelli, the character struck an immediate chord with readers. His popularity was a bit of a surprise —…

For the last seven years, the Xbox One has been one of the internet’s favourite punching bags. The machine that Xbox debuted at Microsoft’s Redmond campus ahead of E3 2013 was suffering an identity crisis. It was a video game console that focused on everything BUT video games. Against a resurgent and clear-minded PlayStation, the…

The pain of being publicly humbled suffuses every part of the Xbox Series X. Its predecessor’s missteps inform every facet of its design, from its outer shell to the operating system that powers it. After seven long years of being trampled by the competition, Xbox is finally getting up off the mat. It has taken…

NBA 2K21’s next generation counterpart will be introducing ‘The W’, a new portion of the game dedicated to the WNBA. Narrated by WNBA legend Candace Parker, the trailer revealed a new fully fledged career mode, which allows players to take their own custom created character through the ranks of the WNBA. It’s worth noting that…

Pikmin 3 is an excellent game. An exceptional one even; perhaps the best possible expression of the cutsey, puzzle-strategy since the first one was released in 2001. Any Nintendo owner worth their salt scrambled for a copy when the original Pikmin 3 when it was released for the Wii U in 2013, and hold fond…

Watch Dogs Legion feels like the game the series has been striving to become since its inception. It’s a game with some of the biggest, boldest ideas to come out of Ubisoft in years. It is also a game that has clearly had to make some concessions in order to execute on these ideas. Merry…

Netflix has announced a new live action original series based on Assassin’s Creed. It will work with game publisher Ubisoft to create AC shows across live action, animation, and anime, Deadline reports. Executive producers Jason Altman and Danielle Krenik from Ubisoft Film & Television currently oversee the project. It is on the hunt for a…

Cyberpunk 2077 has been delayed. Again. Its release date moves from November 19 to December 10. According to developer CD Projekt Red, the reason for the delay has to do with quality assurance. Currently, as many as nine internal builds of Cyberpunk 2077 require testing for compatibility and optimisation. This is a lot of work,…

Immortals: Fenyx Rising is Ubisoft’s first original AAA IP in god only knows how long. Ubi has a built a reputation as a publisher that likes a safe bet. Ubi’s franchises are guaranteed to sell. This makes launching new IP a big risk. That it comes at the dawn of a new hardware cycle is…

Xbox has announced a list of 30 games, optimised for Xbox Series X and Series S hardware, that will be playable on launch day. The Xbox Series X and Series S launch windows are a bit bereft of exclusives. This is no secret and, while certainly a bummer, there’s still plenty to play the day…

One of the biggest remaining questions for Sony ahead of its next big console launch was “What does the PS5 UI look like?” Sony finally got around to answering it last night during the latest State of Play broadcast. Respect the classics Visually, the PS5 UI bears quite a few similarities to the PS4’s menu,…

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is a game named for the grand hall of the slain in Norse mythology, a beautiful place where fallen warriors arrive after death. Perhaps as a contrast, the game is set in the rainy, muddy, utterly miserable north of Britain in the year 873 CE. At the time the Vikings crossed into…

Look at this tasteful Blue Yeti X mic designed around World of Warcraft: Shadowlands. Seriously, look at it. The subdued palette in Battle Grey with gold accents. The artful runes around the mic’s base. The smooth, elegant shape of the mic itself. We don’t get a lot of peripherals in the games sphere that are…

With today’s announcement of the 2020 ARIA Awards nominees, there were several curveball nominations thrown into the mix. One such surprise was the nomination in the Original Soundtrack/Original Cast Album category for the soundtrack to Untitled Goose Game. Composed by Dan Golding, the soundtrack for the smash hit Melbourne-made video game is a work of…

Sony has released a PS5 teardown video for its upcoming PlayStation 5 console. Yasuhiro Ootori, VP of SIE’s Mechanical Design Department, Hardware Design Division, slowly pulls a PlayStation 5 unit apart. In what might be the most formal voiding of a warranty ever recorded for posterity, Ootori-san explains each component as its removed. Ootori-san talks…

From the first, the biggest question I’ve had about Watch Dogs Legion was if it could capitalise on its ambitious concept. It presents a dystopian vision of London held hostage under a fascist paramilitary rule. DedSec, the prolific hacker collective is working to destabilise the regime but they’re having a rough go of it. Numbers…

In the wake of the PlayStation 4 E3 2013 press conference, Jerry Holkins of Penny Arcade called the event a “thunderously applauded public beheading.” Holkins’ assessment captures the moment with perfect clarity. So legendarily bungled was Microsoft’s unveiling of the Xbox One that all Sony had to do was gently, but clearly, rebuke it. Its…

The Godfather is my favourite film of all time, and it was my love of gangster films that led me to Mafia. Released in 2002, it is one of the most underrated and nuanced mobster stories of that or any hardware generation. Since then, the series has both vanished and returned to the fold, along…

After the insanity that was Preorder Day, we thought it might be a good idea to put together a list of all the Xbox Series X accessories you can preorder in Australia. Bare in mind, stock appears to fairly limited for launch so don’t be too disappointed if you miss out, and know that you…

The very first wave of PS5 accessories is on the way, and as we’re sure you can imagine, pre-order shipments are selling out fast. You’re going to need to move quickly if you want to snap any up. To make things a bit easier, we’ve rounded up all the official PS5 accessories dropping on launch…