Video Games

It’s been 16 years since the release of Intelligent Systems’ Advance Wars 2, widely considered one of the greatest turn-based strategy titles ever made, and 11 years since Advance Wars: Dark Conflict (titled Days of Ruin in the US). The intervening period saw the popularity of Intelligent’s Fire Emblem series explode in the West, an unexpected turn…

Gamification in the tech industry is nothing new. Apps like Habitica have taken even the most mundane tasks like ticking items off a checklist and turned them into a role playing game in which you, personally, are the star. You might think that’s pretty full on, but hold on a sec because it gets way…

Pikuniku is an absurd, charming little game from the folks at Devolver Digital, and one that is absolutely fascinating. Styled after the whimsical platformer titles of the PS2 era like Loco Roco and Katamari Damacy, Pikuniku follows the struggles of a little red blob as he awakens in a strange land filled with shiny, happy…

Relationships are messy and fragile, and harsh words have consequences. Rainswept dives into this fragility wholeheartedly, and presents a grounded, if occasionally heavy-handed, tale about life, loss and the complications of love. Rainswept follows Detective Michael Stone as he investigates the seeming murder-suicide of a couple Chris and Diane. Their struggles mirror his own as…

I’ve had questions about Anthem ever since it was announced. It’s been about a year and a half since Anthem was first announced and my questions are finally getting some answers. While EA’s desire for an ongoing MMO shooter in the Destiny mould was understandable, it was the tapping of legendary RPG studio Bioware to create…

I’d been playing Far Cry New Dawn for about an hour when a dusty neuron in the back of my brain began to fire, two thoughts connecting in real time. New Dawn is a spin-off title in the Far Cry series, but is a direct sequel to 2018’s Far Cry 5. The cynical view of…

The following admission may be considered scandalous by Resident Evil devotees: My first experience with the series was when Resident Evil 2 was first ported to the Nintendo 64. It was no small feat getting the game to run on the N64, given the storage limitations presented by its cartridges. FMV cutscenes and large amounts…

Very few Nintendo DS games ever fulfilled the potential of the console’s unique dual screens, but one title came incredibly close. That title, Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story, has finally gotten the recognition it deserves with a brilliant new remaster for the Nintendo 3DS. Originally released in 2009, Bowser’s Inside Story is an RPG…

Gris is pretty special experience. It’s a game with a lot to say, but never actually says a word out loud. Instead, Gris uses its strident, beautiful art style to convey its every thought — linework, animation and colour all have a part to play in this story about finding your way back from a…

If you don’t own a Death Drive Mk II then who even are you? Don’t answer that question; one should not feel guilty if they haven’t heard of the latest gaming console to take the world by storm. That’s because the DDMKII is a fictitious, Black Mirror-esque beast of a machine that doesn’t exist; at…

It might be fair to call Days Gone the PS4 exclusive most of us kind of forgot about. PlayStation’s stellar year of exclusives in 2018, coupled with the decision to skip the end-of-year PlayStation Experience event, meant going a long while between trailers and announcements. It dropped off the radar a bit. But with the…

Ukrainian developer 4A Games have spent the last decade doggedly chasing the perfect adaptation of Metro, Dmitri Glukhovsky’s series of post-apocalyptic science fiction novels. In Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light, 4A gave it everything they had, attempting to execute on their vision with the tools and funding at their disposal. They met with differing degrees of success but…

Since its announcement at The Game Awards late last year, fans have been waiting for a look at Mortal Kombat 11 in action. This morning’s reveal livestream dropped a raft of new trailers for the NetherRealm Studios fighter, all focused on gameplay and characters. Following on from 2015’s Mortal Kombat X, MK11 introduces a time travel…

When we think about game design that could be considered “timeless,” the classic Super Mario Bros formula still leaps readily to mind. 34 years after its first appearance on the NES, Shigeru Miyamoto’s original push-forward platformer design remains as compelling as its ever been. New Super Mario Bros U Deluxe only proves this further, taking…

In mid-November 2018, popular Overwatch streamer and former pro player Brandon “Seagull” Larned posted a video to his YouTube channel titled The State of Overwatch. In it, Seagull breaks down a number of criticisms of Overwatch as a game at present. He takes issue with the state of the game’s ongoing GOATS Composition meta and the abundance…

Margaret Court Arena will play host to a massive Fortnite tournament for the second time in the space of six months. The Australian Open, the nation’s biggest and popular tennis event, is running on a pair of tournaments, the combined prize pool of which comes to $500,000. The first 500 players to register on the…

Choosing your favourite game of the year is hard. We’ve done it every year since we founded The AU Review’s games section in 2014, and it never gets any easier. In 2018, we played so many incredible games that it became impossible to list and number every last one of them, so we opted not…

I’ve been looking everywhere for what might be good gaming merchandise. I’ve trawled through official sites, brick-and-mortar stores and even outlets like Red Bubble. I have to admit, there’s not a whole lot of variety across all three of these, and what’s there is usually not that good, covered in brands or weird quotes or…

I’ve had a rocky relationship with PSVR, to put it as kindly as possible. From mild headaches and blurry vision to a nauseating journey through Skyrim, I feel like I’ve been through the wars with the device. Honestly, it’s not had that much use at all, and I was ready to give up before Borderlands…

It’s December! Which means presents, sales, friends, family… aaand End of Year Events across a range of games! It’s always great – developers preparing content to see the year off with their player-base, usually around a winter-Christmas theme, content to be playable and fresh through until the next year… it’s almost a tradition of online games to…

It’s almost 2019, and that means a whole new year of free games for Xbox Live Gold subscribers. With December’s Games With Gold lineup finally winding down, January’s selection have been announced and they are very bloody good indeed. The month’s selections are four games, divided as always into two Xbox One titles and two…

The shotgun is an immortal video game weapon. It’s simple — you click, they die. No arguments. If its a video game with guns in it, and most of them are, and it doesn’t have a shotgun in it … I mean, what are we even doing here? Its roots are deep, with the most…

In 2018, most new releases across the board from AAA video game titles are around 40 gigabytes in size. This is huge when you consider that games were much lower not too long ago. Skyrim was only 6GB when it was released in 2011. Assassins Creed II was 8GB in 2010, and Crysis was 7GB…

2018 has been crazy good for RPG’s. The worlds that have been massive and immersive, and deep in content. What is curious is how the developers of these games let players in on the facts of the worlds they’ve built. Information is given to players in interesting ways that differ from game-to-game. From letting players…

We have, if you can believe, almost reached the end of the current generation of consoles, and with news of PlayStation pulling out of E3 in 2019 in rumoured preparation of a hardware announcement, speculation is mounting as to what the selling points could be for the next generation. 2019 is going to be an…

With Super Smash Bros Ultimate scratching that fighting game itch pretty well at the moment, you might be on the hunt for some fresh challengers. Good news — this weekend’s CouchWarriors Crossup is not only debuting its brand new Smash Ultimate competition, it’s also a significant stop on the Dragon Ball FighterZ World Cup qualifier…

Blizzard’s announcement of their latest mobile title, Diablo Immortal, shook many fans of the series to their core. For better or worse, Diablo Immortal on Blizzard’s to-do list and that is a fact that its detractors must learn to live with. They can, of course, simply elect to not spend any money on it if they…

PlayStation Australia know that being a gamer in the summer is a bit rubbish. You have to have the windows open so its hard to see the TV during the day, which is no good. If you want to close the place up to create a little darkness, it means running the aircon while you…

It’s safe to say that Fallout 76 has been one of the year’s most controversial releases, plagued with issues ranging from internal bugs, to botched preorder incentives and now a serious privacy and security breach. One of the most recent of the controversies, before the, y’know, significant data breach, was the PR minefield regarding a canvas…

The AU Review has partnered with our friends at Alienware Australia to give away three double passes to the Gfinity Elite Series Finals this weekend! All the finals action will go down at the Gfinity esports arena at Sydney’s Hoyts Entertainment Quarter on Saturday, December 15 and Sunday, December 16. Be there live as Sydney…