Video Games

Hello there, fellow Sonic fan. Remember that period of unalloyed joy during the launch of Sonic Mania this year? The feeling of burgeoning hope that, after 20 years of Sega openly ignoring what made their mascot great, the ol’ blue blur might finally be back on track? Well, forget all that because Sonic Forces is here to make…

If I can communicate anything to you about Need for Speed Payback, it’s this: when the game first asks you to pick a car, choose wisely. Choose wisely, because you’re going to have that car for a really, really long time.

Warner Bros Interactive Entetainment and Niantic have finally, officially, spilled the beans on their Harry Potter mobile collaboration. A boat that had become particularly leaky in the last few days, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite will turn players into real world wizards and witches in much the same way Niantic’s megahit Pokemon GO turned players into IRL Pokemon trainers.

What is this sensation I’m feeling? Is it … enjoyment? Am I actually having fun with a Call of Duty game again? I think I am! My god, it’s been a while.

Boy, Don Mattrick really fucked Xbox, didn’t he? It’s been five years since Microsoft’s now-infamous E3 2013 presentation, the unveiling of an All-in-One corporate fantasy wildly out of step with what its audience actually wanted and expected. Microsoft have been trying to course correct ever since. So dominated have they been by the runaway success…

Telltale Games, a developer known for narrative-focused episodic games like The Wolf Among Us, The Walking Dead and Tales from the Borderlands has laid off a whopping 25% of its entire workforce this morning. The retrenchments, which leave 90 staff members without jobs, come as part of an internal restructuring that will see the company running a smaller…

As of this writing I have had our Xbox One X review unit in my home for eight days. The console, along with a generous care package of games including console exclusives, new releases and a few November headliners, arrived the Thursday afternoon before PAX Aus. I’ve been able to play three of these games…

The most popular game in the world, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, is coming to Xbox One. This we’ve known since E3 earlier this year. What we haven’t known was when. Now we have an answer, and it’s way sooner than you were expecting.

Pause Festival held a event at Melbourne’s Federation Square this morning for the launch of its 2018 program. The technology and innovation festival, now in its eighth year, brings together some of the best and brightest from across the tech world for a multi-day event in the heart of Melbourne. None of that was particularly…

Following player ire regarding Star Wars Battlefront II‘s implementation of loot box and XP progression systems during the game’s last beta period, Electronic Arts and developer DICE have announced a re-balancing of both systems in time for launch.

If you, or someone you know, could be considered a fan of rugby then there might come a point in your life where playing Rugby 18 seems like a good idea. I want you to know from the bottom of my heart that that won’t be true. That way lies disappointment and regret because in Rugby 18,…

Oh boy, where does one start with an experience like the one Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus offers? The second game in a week to prove that the single-player experience as we know it is still very much alive and well, Wolfenstein II is the kind of shooter we haven’t had in a while — one with a…

Paris Games Week kicks off bright any early tomorrow morning and Sony aren’t wasting any time. Tweeting that “E3 was only half the story,” the publisher is promising a barrage of announcements from their press conference. 

Sony have unveiled a brand new trailer for Naughty Dog’s upcoming The Last of Us Part II during their Paris Games Week media conference. The trailer is curiously devoid of any appearance by series heroes Ellie or Joel, but does feature another popular Naughty Dog player. It is also not for the squeamish.

Christmas arrived a little early this year. PlayStation’s media conference kicked off Paris Games Week with a bang — some solid AAA trailers and a metric tonne of fabulous indie titles to look forward to. There’s a lot to cover so we’ve put every trailer Sony had to show off in one place just because…

“Shit, have they capped the line?” wondered a 20-something woman in a home made Bayonetta cosplay, arriving only minutes before Saturday night’s Let’s Play Some Bad Dating Sims panel in the Galah Theatre. Her boyfriend, dressed less ambitiously in a tee and jeans, stared hopelessly at the line. “Guys!” I called excitedly from my position…

Here we are again, the second chapter in the increasingly amazing  Life is Strange: Before the Storm. Episode 2: A Brave New World opens not long after Rachel Amber decided it would be cool to start a fire in the local forest of Arcadia after losing her shit. As the huge storm slowly approached Arcadia in…

Assassin’s Creed Origins is a greatest hits of modern action-adventure game design. In seeking to update the series’ ageing core mechanics and design, Origins looks to its genre stablemates to see what they’re doing and where it can’t subtly imitate them, it copies them brazenly instead. What surprised me the most about this smash-and-grab design philosophy…

Often to their detriment, Nintendo are big fans of the remaster, pulling games from the past and updating them for a new generation seemingly to fill a release schedule plagued by a lack of strong, ongoing third-party relationships. I don’t buy into it half the time, but things are a bit different with Mario &…

Super Mario Odyssey is the good and pure video game that this awful world needs right now. It is the kind of game that gives you hope for the form. It reminds you that AAA games can still be more than pretty window dressing for a microtransaction storefront. That they can actually still be fun. It’s a…

The Evil Within 2 is an interesting sequel of sorts. If falls into a weird mix of fun, frustrating, wonderfully weird and scary all at the same time. While it’s not a bad game by any means, but for every positive, there’s a negative. Presenting players with a sequel that attempts to carry on an…

Fire Emblem Warriors attempts to mash up the long-running series of turn-based tactical RPGs with Koei Tecmo’s equally venerable Dynasty Warriors. On paper, this seems like a novel idea — these are two properties that seem like they’d be a good fit. In practice, Fire Emblem Warriors is the video game equivalent of swigging orange juice after brushing your…

Gran Turismo Sport is one of the most interesting racing titles I’ve played in years. This is for many different reasons, some good, and some surprisingly bad. While it has its rough edges, rest assured this is most definitely a great game with a ton of things to love — but dated and bland ideas…

Xbox Australia and Eventbrite are opening a pop up gaming hotel in Sydney that will allow guests a chance to go hands on with the new Xbox One X console ahead of launch. Feel like a sleep over?

For fans of Blizzard Entertainment titles like Overwatch, Heroes of the Storm, World of Warcraft, StarCraft, Diablo and Hearthstone, there’s no bigger date than BlizzCon. But for Australian fans, BlizzCon 2017’s home at the Anaheim Convention Centre in Los Angeles is a pretty epic trip to make. That’s why we’ve teamed up with Blizzard ANZ to give away 10 Virtual…

Three things are certain in life: death, taxes and WWE 2K games. As each year rolls around, gamers are presented with yet another WWE game with a fresh lick of paint, a new set of moves and a couple of newer wrestlers here and there. Given the trend, you’d expect 2K would pull out all…

Melbourne developer Big Ant are no strangers to including women’s teams in their cricket titles.  Last year’s Don Bradman Cricket 17 also featured women’s cricket in prominent modes and the developer’s newest title, Ashes Cricket, is doing the same. Ashes Cricket will also go the extra step of authentically modelling popular, real world female players in the same level of…

The marketing for Bethesda’s Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus has been among the year’s absolute best. After finding itself in the peculiar position of having to defend its core tenet of “Fuck Nazis” in a world where white nationalists rally in the open, the game has steered aggressively into any and all online resistance. It’s final trailer ahead…

Humble Bundle has struck again. The charity fundraising site’s latest video game bundle highlights some of Australia’s best independently made video games. The asking price? Next to nothing.

Electronic Arts have closed the doors on in-house developer Visceral Games. The publisher announced the closure in a blog post from executive vice president Patrick Söderlund, along with the news that they would be making rather sweeping changes to Visceral’s still unnamed Star Wars adventure game.