Video Games

Middle-earth: Shadow of War is a game suffering an identity crisis. It knows what it wants to be and makes genuinely big strides in that direction, but it’s hampered by what seems to be publisher interference. Even at the surface level, it feels like a case study for the growing divide in AAA between developer…

When you first jump into South Park: The Fractured But Whole, you pick up from where the last game, The Stick of Truth, and the last episode of the TV series (Season 21, Episode 4 “Franchise Prequel”), leave off. The boys have stopped playing a Lord of the Rings style quest and are now building their own…

This weekend saw the EB Expo return to its roots, overtaking the Gold Coast Convention and Exhibition Centre for the first time in five years. It was, by all accounts, a successful homecoming.

It’s the most magical time of the year, and I’m not talking about Halloween. PAX Aus 2017 approaches and the full panel and event schedule has gone live this morning. Time to start planning your PAX weekend.

As I write this, Assassin’s Creed Origins releases in exactly one month from today. It is, quite rightly, the subject of a bit of scrutiny from fans and detractors of the series alike. The first title to break with the series’ long running annual release pattern in quite a while, Origins has a lot of questions to answer….

Australian indie developer House House (Push Me, Pull You) dropped a trailer on Monday for their next title, an untitled honk-em-up in which you play a goose that terrorises a village garden.

Given that it was built from the ground up to be a showcase for the Xbox One X console launching in November, it feels a bit weird to be reviewing Forza Motorsport 7 on my Day One launch edition Xbox One. Racing games have been enlisted as gorgeous tech demo for fresh hardware, don’t go in thinking the…

Gaming peripheral manufacturer Turtle Beach launched a new series of wireless headsets this week. The Stealth 600 and Stealth 700 are bit of a funny combo, aiming to please those who value style and cord cutting ease of use and the high-end customer looking for excellent positional sound.

Popular Japanese clothing brand Uniqlo is bringing their range of Nintendo-themed tees to Australian shores this week. The designs are pulled from the UTGP2017  global t-shirt design competition, were handpicked by Nintendo and video game royalty Shigeru Miyamoto and now you can get them if you want them.

Love it or hate it, the single most important Australian contribution to the Xbox family this side of Forza Horizon 3, the Xbox Onesie, is coming back. The new garment, with an updated design, is set to drop just days after the release of Forza Motorsport 7.

Hot off the heels of a hands on with Forza Motorsport 7, the most visible racing series in recent memory, I went into my preview session with Gran Turismo Sport wondering if the elder statesman of racing games could make an impression given its effusive competition. It did, and what’s more, I realised I’d missed GT a little.

The Super Nintendo Entertainment System Classic Mini released around the world over the weekend to rapturous applause from longtime SNES devotees, packing a ton of nostalgia into an extremely small package. I missed out on a first round pre-order on the device, and we were not able to obtain a unit for review from Nintendo…

By now you’ve almost certainly heard about Cuphead and its pronounced level of difficulty so let’s begin this review with a declaration: Cuphead is hard. But it’s also way less hard than you might think it is. Having just spent the weekend with the SNES Mini and being reminded of what true old school game design was like,…

The next time you have a creative project that you feel isn’t coming together quickly enough, I want you to remember that it took Creative Assembly 20 years of rigourous experimentation, honing the things that worked and pruning back the things that didn’t, to get their Total War series to the point where it’s damned near…

NHL 18 wants to be a mirror to this year’s Stanley Cup — no bells, no whistles, no brawls or bullshit, just great skillful hockey. That’s what it wants, and it’s a noble goal, but sadly the puck never quite finds the back of the net.

Another day, another port for Nintendo Switch, but that’s ok, we were all worried we wouldn’t be getting what Nintendo promised us, a more mainstream console with third-party support. We got it, and here’s another solid example of their new ethos — Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2!

The NBA 2k series has dominated the basketball simulator landscape for about a decade now and, with NBA 2K18 finally on our shelves, it’s safe to say that this series still holds the crown. Quite simply, this is the best NBA game you can play right now. Coming up against the NBA Live series for the first…

Sony Interactive Entertainment Australia is kicking off a new competition called PlayStation Plus Platinum Hunters. The goal is for players to unlock every trophy within four specific games.

Project Cars 2 is an interesting experience. While it’s first outing presented players with stiff controls, a lack of car variety and overall depth, Project Cars 2 attempts to rectify these issues, while bringing back the racing simulator into the mainstream. But can it top the likes of Gran Turismo or Forza Motorsport? While the…

Rayman Legends: Definitive Edition for Nintendo Switch, now the eighth system the game has been ported to, may still be a great game and one of the best platformers since the original Rayman titles and those other Nintendo titles with the ex-plumber, but it’s far from the Definitive version.

Do you remember the last time you played an entry in the NBA Live series? Me either. More or less off the radar for about a decade at this point, the series is back in the public eye this year with NBA Live 18, a basketball sim with a clear desire to leave the series’ average reputation behind.

Dishonored: Death of the Outsider takes former-apprentice assassin Billie Lurk, a character the series has heretofore considered little more than a side-kick, and catapults her into the spotlight as a lead. The final game in the current Dishonored series hands Billie an unenviable task — find and kill the Outsider.

XCOM 2 is, at its heart, a game about loss. It’s why save-scumming, the act of loading an earlier save in an effort to avoid catastrophe, is so frowned upon in the game’s community. Losing valuable soldiers isn’t just a part of the game, it fills out the unscripted narrative of your personal XCOM 2 experience….

I’ve now played Super Mario Odyssey twice. The first time was at E3 in Los Angeles earlier this year. The second was at Nintendo’s Australian headquarters in Melbourne earlier this week. From these two brief sessions, I can tell you this — I love Super Mario Odyssey so much.

So you managed to snag a preorder on the Xbox One X before they sold out. Fantastic effort, great job! But what the hell are you going to play on it, and which games will allow you to take advantage of all that raw power? Xbox Australia invited us to a hands on event in…

The Xbox One X has been met with a bit of bemusement by Australian gaming hobbyists so far. First we couldn’t pre-order the machine but could instead go on a waitlist. Then it was announced that the unit was cost Aussie punters a whopping $649.95 AUD. Then pre-orders for the machine finally opened but the…

Given that I skipped the Wii U generation of Nintendo consoles (a decision I absolutely do not regret), I managed to miss Pokkén Tournament when it originally released. For those who made a similar decision, it’s time to go back on it – Pokkén Tournament DX is one of the most enjoyable and incredibly addictive…

It is a truth universally acknowledged that powerful new video game consoles must be in want of a pretty racing game for their launch lineup.

Destiny was the first game I reviewed for this site, back when the games section was still called VideAU Games, an offshoot of The Iris‘ parent site, The AU Review. On launch, it was an ambitious but deeply flawed experiment in the MMO space, hyped beyond almost any other game in recent memory. It weathered two major…

The demand for Overwatch characters in Blizzard’s popular strategic hero brawler Heroes of the Storm has been rife ever since the game’s roster of iconic heroes was announced. Having added D.va, Tracer, Genji and Zarya to the mix in previous updates, Blizzard have now revealed two new Overwatch characters heading to the Nexus — Ana and Junkrat. While not much…