Reviews

Troll & I sadly is another blunder of a mess wrapped in the price of a triple A title. It’s upsetting because the concept of Troll and I was a great one and given to a well-received Developer.

We live in the era of Nostalgia As A Marketing Tool. The repackaging of childhood memories, sold back to millennial audiences for a profit, has become the go-to move for film and video game studios looking to make a fast buck. Sometimes these experiments in nostalgia work out. Sometimes they are a hard lesson in learning…

In a lot of ways for me, revisiting the Kingdom Hearts franchise is a lot like coming home. The original game was one of my first Playstation 2 titles, and one that’s stuck with me for a long time. From the deep, immersive lore of the series to the unrelenting positivity and charm, Kingdom Hearts…

As someone new to the Persona series, the newest entry had me equal parts curious and baffled. Coming into a series with little prior knowledge or experience is a daunting experience, but Persona 5 had me wrapped around its finger from the moment it began. With the introduction of the game, which features a mysterious…

There are two kinds of people in the world – people that will love Paradigm, and people that can’t stand to see perfection. Paradigm is everything that it needs to be – uncomfortably strange, genuinely hilarious, oddly touching and highly memorable, all at once. For a game that stars a deformed, vaguely European mutant and…

Mass Effect has been a series on my personal review Bucket List for quite some time. I wasn’t yet working as a journalist and critic when Mass Effect 3 was released in 2012 and so Bioware’s big post-Shepard return to the series, Mass Effect: Andromeda, was in my sights. Having finally crossed this particular item off my bucket list,…

Bomberman is one of those gaming franchises that has achieved Institution status. For many of us, even those of us who were born in the Eighties like me, it seems like the little guy has always been around. After series developer Hudson Soft folded up in 2012, it seemed like Bomberman‘s generation spanning run had finally…

NieR: Automata is immediately recognisable as a special game, which thrives on its world, characters, mechanics and ultimately the questions it raises and how they are posed to the player. While remaining engaging and thought provoking, platinum games brings back the combat mechanics seen in their previous titles such as Bayonetta and Metal Gear Rising…

Snipperclips is a game that sees two or more players using their Nintendo Switch Joy-Con controllers to manipulate their own bell-shaped paper blob to overlap other players and use their bodies to cut shapes into their friends. These shapes are then used to solve any number of geometric puzzles. That’s it. That’s the whole game….

Who doesn’t love a crash-centric arcade racer? Throw in every physics-based toy you can think of, from ragdolls to realistic vehicle damage, with a difficulty curve that could generously be described as “mean-spirited” and you’ve got the recipe for FlatOut 4.

I spent a good half an hour trying to come up with a headline for this review before settling on the one you just clicked on. I spent a lot longer trying to review the game itself — you may notice that we’re coming in rather later with this review than some of our contemporaries. The…

Despite being a spin-off of popular RPG Of Orcs and Men, the Styx franchise has largely flown under the radar in the stealth genre. The first game, Master of Shadows, was a digital-only release, but with its newest entry, it’s finally time for the series to get the attention it deserves. Simply put, Styx: Shards…

Over the course of the first 50 levels of Death Squared, I accidentally sent my loyal robot companions to their deaths over 260 times. But each time, I learned something new, and was able to press on to new and greater heights in the game. The further I delved into the game, the more I…

I never played 2012’s Gravity Rush. At the time it was almost a PS Vita must have. Not only because it was one of the few stand out games on the handheld but because its main feature required you to move the console around, basically showing off the fancy features of the then, fairly new…

During my first six hours with Horizon: Zero Dawn a phrase appeared in my head and got lodged there, as phrases like to do when you write for a living. The phrase in question was “This is once-in-a-hardware-generation stuff.” It stuck with me as my playthrough progressed, and it wasn’t until I’d been away from the game…

As a fan of the Dragon Ball franchise, its newest handheld entry, Dragon Ball Fusions, was an absolute delight. Blending the colourful characters of Akira Toriyama’s ever-expanding series with surprisingly addictive turn-based gameplay, Fusions provides an entertaining and gorgeous-looking romp through the many worlds and environments of the Dragon Ball series. While it may not…

It’s almost impossible for Nioh to dodge comparisons to the Dark Souls franchise. From Software’s monstrously brutal action RPGs have become touchstones for hardcore gaming in the 21st century but, as Team Ninja prove with their latest title, there’s more than enough room for improvement. Instead of coming across as a desperate imitation, Nioh draws it’s strength…

Real-time strategy has all but disappeared from the gaming lexicon in the last twenty years. From its heyday in the 1990’s with Command & Conquer, StarCraft and Total Annihilation, the genre seemingly peaked with Blizzard’s Warcraft 3 in 2002. From there, it entered an evolutionary phase, emerging in the early 2010’s as the all-powerful genre known as the MOBA. Halo Wars…

Sure, punching Nazis may be fun, but have you have ever eviscerated one with a single bullet, flung from the dangerous end of a powerful sniper rifle by a shot taken from almost 300m away? How about shooting one in the skull with a bullet that travels so fast that it rips past a young…

I don’t do well in carnival haunted houses. If you want to test my loyalty and devotion as a friend or loved one, do not accompany me into a house of horrors. You could be the most important person in the world to me and I will throw you under the spooky-ass bus if it…

Yakuza 0 is the latest addition to SEGA’s long-running series of adventure games set in the Japanese criminal underworld. A prequel to the 2005 original, Yakuza 0 is all about how series mainstay Kazuma Kiryu began his bloody career in the mob.

The Last Guardian is the second of two games to release this month to boast a near decade-long development cycle. Where Final Fantasy XV feels like it’s used the time wisely and brings a sense of modernity to the franchise, The Last Guardian feels very much like a relic, stretched between the last two hardware generations and the current one.

As is well documented on this website by now, I am an avowed Assassin’s Creed fanboy. Where others have abandoned the series due to a lack of innovation after the revelatory experience of Black Flag or the unmitigated disaster that was Unity, I’ve stuck with it. I made it through Assassin’s Creed 3. I even played those side-scrolling Chronicles titles nobody…

For an industry that spends so much of its time focused on getting things done in time for the Christmas season, video games themselves do not seem to give much of a shit about Christmas as a setting. Dead Rising 4 is one of only a handful of games I can think of in recent years…

Malcolm Gladwell once said that anyone could perfect a talent or work with 10, 000 hours of practice. Those 10, 000 hours can take years to accrue, depending on how often life gets in the way. Imagine then (should to believe his assertion to ring true) what the result would be if you filled an…

Niantic’s Pokemon Go quite obviously paved the way for the next installment in traditional handheld Pokemon games to make a big impact on the video game market. We are now in the seventh generation of the irresistible RPG series and, as expected, dual titles Pokemon Sun and Pokemon Moon have been breaking sales records since…

It was only around 18 months ago that Bandai Namco decided to run an experiment with their well-worn Dragon Ball video game license. Marrying the 3D fighter mechanics of their long-running Budokai and Tenkaichi series to an RPG-style progession system and character creation module, the result was interesting, if a little clunky and certainly put a new spin on the same…

Nostalgia never dies, and is almost always a completely viable way to market something. That notion has been proven by Nintendo time and time again, and while riffing on past triumphs may have worked to the brand’s detriment at times, no one can deny the joy of being able to revisit your childhood through gaming….

I was in the minority when the original Dishonored came out back in 2012. When it seemed like the entire world was throwing roses at the game’s feet, I found it to be a competent if uninspired homage to the Thief series with a few superpowers thrown in. Dishonored 2 is certainly a better game than its predecessor in many ways,…

To say that I was not a fan of Watch Dogs would be a bit of an understatement. Despite its fantastic concept and an E3 showing that blew the doors off the show in 2013, the finished game was a dreary, by-the-numbers open world shooter that sold quite well but ultimately failed to engage. Ubisoft have…