Previews

NBA 2K22

A First Look at NBA 2K22’s New and Returning Features

Basketball mania continues! The NBA Finals are drawing to a close, offseason madness is set to begin and we were treated to some sweet NBA 2K22 cover athlete announcements. To top it all off, we got the chance to speak with the team at Visual Concepts and 2K Games as Mike Wang (Gameplay Director), Erick…

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Great Ace Attorney Chronicles

The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles Preview: New evidence comes to light

The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles is finally coming to the West. The package collects both The Great Ace Attorney: Adventures and The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles 2: Resolve. Both games made their debut in Japan on the Nintendo 3DS in 2015. Both games were ported to iOS and Android in 2017. Neither game ever launched…

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Sea of Thieves: A Pirate’s Life Preview: You’re full of Tall Tales, Sparrow

This week Sea of Thieves will launch A Pirate’s Life, one of the game’s most impactful updates ever. The update, which launches in tandem with its Season Three content drop, is a set of five new Tall Tales all centred around Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Tall Tales are the Sea of Thieves version…

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F1 2021 Preview: New season, new publisher, same strong sim

F1 2021 is the first game in the long-running Formula 1 racing series following EA’s acquisition of developer Codemasters. While the vast majority of the game retains the same look and feel of F1 games past, F1 2021 makes a few important strides toward accessibility that are in line with the modern EA Sports ethos….

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Deathloop

Deathloop Preview: Aw sh**, here we go again

With the just-released Returnal proving popular among players and critics, Arkane Studios is preparing Deathloop, a timeloop shooter of its own. The era of the AAA rougelike, it seems, is upon us. Groundhog day Deathloop is a first-person immersive-sim shooter heavily inspired by the blaxploitation cinema of the 1970’s. In the game, hero Cole Vahn…

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Diablo 2 Resurrected technical alpha

Diablo 2 Resurrected Technical Alpha Impressions: Preserved in amber

The first thing you notice about the0 Diablo 2 Resurrected technical alpha is the way it looks just the way you remember it. The (by today’s standards) low-res models and environments have given way to a crisp, clean visual overhaul. It’s exactly the kind of remaster a community like the one that clings to Diablo…

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The Elder Scrolls Online: Blackwood

The Elder Scrolls Online: Blackwood Preview: Companions and conflict

The Elder Scrolls Online: Blackwood is trying to solve to an impossible problem the game has grappled with for most of its life. Unable to fully emulate the trappings of its beloved parent series, and willing to fully embrace being its own thing, TESO has instead tried to do both. For the longest time, it has…

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Outriders

Outriders Demo Impressions: A Strong Start

On the surface, Outriders may seem like your average looter shooter. In many ways, it is. Outriders feels like an iteration of recent looter shooter RPG titles like Destiny 2 or The Division. It’s filled with mechanics and systems we’ve seen many times before. In saying that, there is still plenty to love about Outriders’…

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Immortals: Fenyx Rising Preview: Wild at heart

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…

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Assassin's Creed Valhalla

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Preview: Stealth is for the weak

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…

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Watch Dogs Legion

Watch Dogs Legion Preview: Systems on

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…

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NBA 2K21 Preview: Small Steps Forward

With the next generation of consoles looming, developer Visual Concepts has decided to shed some light on the current generation’s version of NBA 2K21, highlighting some new and improved features, updated modes and revamped locations. While much of the next-gen version is still under wraps, our sneak peak has given us a positive feeling about…

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Mafia: Definitive Edition

Mafia: Definitive Edition Preview: Got the life

Though still in production at the time of writing, the Mafia: Definitive Edition remaster feels like it’s stretched between two extremes. It wants to pay homage to a well-liked yarn, ensuring players in the modern era can still experience Tommy Angelo’s rise to power. But it also has to translate game design and mechanics from…

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Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 Preview: Pretending I’m a Superman

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 are the video game equivalent of The Beatles. Even if you’ve never actively played them before, you still know a lot about them by pure cultural osmosis. I could ask you about Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and, if you care about video games at all, you could likely tell me something…

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PGA Tour 2K21

PGA Tour 2K21 Preview: The unlikely career of the malignant Clint Golfboy

After proving their bona fides with The Golf Club series, developer HB Studios has gone all in. PGA Tour 2K21 aims to return the humble golf sim to the glory days of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 14, with real-life courses and real-life golfers in the mix. Unline any of these real-life golfers, I am not very…

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Marvel’s Avengers Closed Beta Preview: Shouldering a heavy load

With the way Marvel’s MCU has come to dominate the movie landscape, and AAA superhero games such as Marvel’s Spider-Man breaking sales records, there’s been a lot of interest in Square Enix’s take on Marvel’s Avengers. We got our hands on roughly three hours of gameplay in this week’s Closed Beta, and while there’s plenty…

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Flight Simulator

Microsoft Flight Simulator Preview: Pure, unalloyed joy

Microsoft Flight Simulator feels really good and is happy to meet you where you are, regardless of whether you’re a long-time fan of the series or a complete aviation novice, and that’s all you need to know. End of preview? No? I’ve still got another 1700 words to fill? Okay, no, no it’s fine, I…

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Disintegration Review: A unique shooter, but only flashes of potential

Aggressively blending real-time strategy and first-person shooter elements works, on paper. Disintegration is the latest title to hybridise the two genres, promising a new kind of gameplay that, while interesting, lacks the necessary depth to truly set it apart from novel sci-fi games of the past. Driving the hype behind this game is the involvement…

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Minecraft Dungeons

Minecraft Dungeons Beta Preview: Building something big

I did not expect to have as much fun with Minecraft Dungeons as I have. I’ve been a fan of the Diablo-style ARPG for many years and one of my favourite things to do is inspecting new takes on the formula, poking around to see how they stack up to the genre’s eternal grandfather. It’s clear…

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Doom Eternal Preview: Not for the faint hearted

I never expected jumping back into the role of Doomslayer was going to be a walk in the park, but the level of non-stop carnage and breathless, rhythmic gameplay still caught me off guard. It’s been years since I rage-quit the acclaimed 2016 iteration of Doom (I’ll pick it up again, one day), but even…

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Final Fantasy VII Remake Preview: Home to Midgar

When your goal is to remake a game like Final Fantasy VII, where do you even begin? Lets set aside its legendary status and the pressure of delivering on such a project. Consider instead the more intricate moving parts — its characters, mechanics and systems, its visuals, art direction, and score. Its sheer size presents…

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Warcraft III Reforged Beta Impressions: Feels like home

Warcraft III has loomed large in my mind ever since its launch in 2002. A natural evolution of the real-time strategy games that birthed the franchise, Warcraft III turned the genre on its ear. The introduction of hero units, named characters more powerful than a typical soldier, made it unique within the genre. To see Blizzard…

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PAX AUS 2019: Hands-on with Marvel’s Avengers

It’s no secret that Marvel’s Avengers appearance at PAX Aus 2019 was one of the biggest, if not the biggest title on the show floor; so you just know we had to hit it up. My 20 minutes with Marvel’s Avengers was an eye opening experience to say the least, as I had shared some…

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The 5 biggest games we played at PAX 2019

After a barrage of impressive indie titles, I simply had to make another top 5 to round out the rest. So without further ado, let me bring to you the top 5 overall games from the PAX Aus 2019 floor. Keep in mind, we only got to see or play brief moments of the final…

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The 5 best indie games we played at PAX Aus 2019

PAX Rising has always satisfied my craving for new and inventive experiences, and this year is no different. So once again, I decided to roam the floor and dive into as many indie titles as I can, picking out my top 5 indie titles from PAX Aus 2019. Keep in mind, these are not reviews…

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PAX Aus 2019: Biomutant feels like it could have been made in Australia

Biomutant was extremely weird, and the PAX build was rather janky but that didn’t change one important factor: I think I love it. Biomutant is a game about survival as a tiny mammalian mutant that looks a bit like a koala. Surviving on what seems to be a version of Earth that suffered some massive…

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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Beta Impressions: A strong start

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare has sparked both anticipation and controversy since its reveal earlier this year. With multiplayer gameplay revealed for the first time last month, gamers are still left with one question; how does it feel in the hands? While the official release is still a while away, the beta has answered many…

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Ghost Recon Breakpoint‘s closed beta offers great tactical combat, grim new tone

The Ghost Recon franchise returns yet again, giving gamers a tactical option in a world full of run-and-gun looter shooters. I must say that I rather enjoyed Ghost Recon Wildlands, boasting a large, if a little bland open world, and a truckload of content to complete. Gameplay was tight, responsive and ‘tactical’ in its nature….

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Borderlands 3 Preview: Welcome back to Pandora. We’re leaving.

In early May, I was among the first in the world to play Borderlands 3 at the official gameplay reveal event in Los Angeles. That preview gave us access to two of the game’s four classes — the muscular Siren Amara and the cloak-and-dagger Operative Zane. We were promised then that we’d get to spend…

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Sega Mega Drive Mini Preview: The arcade at home

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…

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