Video Games

For the first few hours, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order feels very much of a time and place — specifically 2006, which was when the previous installment was released. My first impression was of a game that felt rather samey, and a touch clunky at times. Critically, and despite its 13 year hiatus,…

In the last few years, I’ve watched on as friends with happy, Super Nintendo-infused childhoods got to grips with the SNES Mini. The SNES Mini is a recreation of Nintendo’s legendary machine that is as elegant as it is functional — a curatorial showcase of its greatest titles, controllers that were made of the same…

Whatever the reason we had to wait so long to get this in Australia, I for one am just glad that it’s here and that it exists. Adelaide-based indie developers Team Cherry truly blessed the gaming community when they released Hollow Knight a few years ago, followed by a widely acclaimed roll-out on all current-gen…

Monster Hunter World: Iceborne feels like it’s got a lot it wants to do. It has the unenviable task of expanding and refining a game that is known for its high level of technical and mechanical complexity. Fans keep coming back to the series because they love that complexity. Thus a lot of fans are…

Another month, another bundle of kick-ass PS4 freebies from your buds at PlayStation. Following on from last month’s Horizon Chase Turbo and last-minute sub-in Detroit: Become Human, two new titles step up to the plate for August. Starting August 5, you’ll be jumping into WipEout Omega Collection and Sniper Elite 4. WipEout Omega Collection is…

Another month, another four-pack of free games for Xbox One owners. August tees up some of the Xbox One’s bigger releases for later this year and continues a thread from last month’s Games With Gold titles. You’ll be able to grab Gears of War 4 in its entirety, for the entire month of August, for…

Let’s face it. The release of Wolfenstein: Youngblood has been predictably depressing. Angry men whining that the game has a SJW agenda. Angry men whining that it’s putting politics in their gaming. Angry men just being, you know. Angry men. And 2019 is peak angry internet man season, let’s be real. Parcel out a gleaming…

PlayStation’s Winter Sale has begun, taking steep discounts — as much as 60% — off some of the PS4’s greatest and most popular games. If there’s one thing we know for sure, it’s that gamers love a discount. Everything from 2019 new releases to platform exclusives and must-haves have been discounted. Instant classics and platform…

If you’re hype for Ubisoft’s forthcoming games lineup, you’re going to want to get along to The Ubisoft Experience, a travelling fan event coming to Sydney this September. The show is, at its heart, a charity drive for the R U OK organisation who promote suicide awareness and prevention in Australia. Tickets for entry will…

Fire Emblem: Three Houses is made up of so many narrative and mechanical moving parts that it feels like it should be collapsing under its own weight. Instead, like one of its steely tactical field commanders, it never wavers in its vision or its confidence in itself. A far cry from the Fire Emblem games…

My Friend Pedro plays almost exactly like an old Xbox game called Total Overdose, which is to say that it sits somewhere between Max Payne and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. It’s a game about stylish murder, one that teaches you to look for ways to make the most of your carnage. It rewards effective play,…

F1 2019 is in many ways, still the best Formula 1 racing game on the planet. But in doing so, it slows down its revolutionary formula for an evolutionary approach. While it makes enough changes year-to-year for this to remain a stellar instalment, I can’t help but feel it already had perfected things a year…

The surrealistic horrors imagined by New England author H. P. Lovecraft have always bled into the open plans of fantasy, which is why the eccentric writer has long been such a heavy influence on the video game world. With survival-horror picking up massively in popularity, especially since The Last of Us, his indelible prints have…

I’m a huge fan of the fighting game genre. Mortal Kombat, Tekken, Street Fighter, Soul Calibur. You name it, I love it. But Samurai Shodown, a venerable SNK franchise I had heard of but never played, had eluded me. Part reboot, part sequel, the latest entry in the long-running series (which reduces the title back…

July’s range of free titles in the Xbox Live Games with Gold program are a bit of a mixed bag — a pair of games considered era-defining master works within their genre, a cute, chaotic four-player multiplayer party game and also Meet the Robinsons, a game based on a Disney movie you’d forgotten about until…

It’s a very one-or-the-other month for PlayStation Plus subscription holders. July’s rotation of free games has been revealed and its sure to be polarising. Your titles are: Pro Evo Soccer 2019 and Horizon Chase Turbo. Some of you, those who don’t like sports games, are maybe feeling a bit deflated right now but we urge…

It’s hard to believe it’s been 20 years since the Crash Team Racing released on the original PlayStation, a game determined to set itself apart from genre titan Mario Kart. Thankfully, Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled recaptures the experience of playing CTR again for the first time, bursting with flavour, variety and fun, and packed with…

You don’t appreciate how many different kinds of Mario levels there are until you try to make one of your own. Super Mario Maker 2 had only been running on my Switch for about fifteen minutes, unfettered latitude to design the greatest Super Mario Bros title ever made at my fingertips, and I could already…

After almost 15 years of games buried deep in the criminal psyche, the Yakuza series makes an abrupt pivot to the other side of the law in Judgment, a spin-off title about a worn-down private detective working the mean streets of Kamurocho. A Japanese crime thriller with a few action and RPG aspects thrown in…

Void Bastards is an independent space shooter produced by Blue Manchu, a studio based right here in Aus. While it borrows liberally from numerous science fiction games, it shares a great deal of conceptual space with roguelikes in the vein of FTL. Indeed, if one were so inclined, it would be easy to view Void…

Listen, if you haven’t played Crypt of the NecroDancer then I think you should remedy this right away. One of the most enjoyable and inventive roguelike titles released in the last five years, NecroDancer married rhythm games with dungeon delving in a way that hooks the player and won’t let them go. It borrowed the…

Persona Q2: The Cinema Labyrinth is a quirky little game, mixing the classic gameplay formula of Etrian Odyssey with Persona‘s ‘so hot right now’ shoot ’em up style. The blend works well for the most part, making Persona Q2 a fun and always interesting experience. You play as Joker, the ever popular protagonist of Persona…

Tomb Raider developer Crystal Dynamics have been hard at work on an Avengers game with Marvel for several years now. Their work on the title was so involved that it meant getting Eidos Montreal to help them complete 2018’s Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Avengers (we thought it would have a subtitle but it doesn’t)…

While not much was shown, it seems as though Ubisoft have finally decided to take a dive into the zombie-genre with a trailer for Rainbow Six: Quarantine. The trailer opens with an infected operative making their last stand in the corner of a darkly lit room, with the infected nearing their location. The watch they are…

Square Enix have delivered what may have been the biggest shot of raw fan service out of any E3 presentation so far. The publisher’s E3 press briefing dedicated its opening twenty minutes to Final Fantasy VII Remake, and every second of it had fans in the audience screaming with delight. Hit the embed below and…

Years of silence from Square Enix had left fans to wonder if Final Fantasy VIII would ever find its way to current gen platforms. We have good news. A brand new remaster is on the way, updated for 4K resolution. No, this is not a trick. It’s not a beautiful dream. Here’s the proof, straight from…

Nintendo have confirmed that a sequel to 2017’s platform-defining, formula altering The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is in development. The announcement came at the end of one of the biggest E3 Nintendo Directs ever broadcast. The trailer promises a similar aesthetic and a direct continuation of the Breath of the Wild story….

It finally happened. After years of asking, of patient and dedicated petitioning, Bear and Bird are coming home. Banjo-Kazooie was confirmed for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate during this year’s Nintendo E3 Direct broadcast. We get a look at the dream team at work in-game, complete with classic N64-era design and move-list. It’s the stuff of…

Empire of Sin is a new strategy game from Paradox Interactive and Romero Games, the independent studio founded by Doom co-creator John Romero. It dropped its first trailer during this morning’s Nintendo Direct at E3 and looks to merge the top-down strategy of XCOM with 1920’s prohibition era America. The trailer features baroom brawls, gun fights…

It’s been a while since we’ve seen a Mario & Sonic at the Olympics title but with the Tokyo 2020 games on the horizon, you’d better believe Nintendo is getting into the spirit. The trailer, which first appeared during this morning’s E3 edition of Nintendo Direct, features a number of new sports including surfing, skateboarding,…