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…
Instead of pushing back against the inevitable Pokemon comparisons that have been buzzing about ever since the first entry, Yo-kai Watch 2 seems to be welcoming the parallels, particularly by splitting up the sequel into two “same but slightly different” games: Fleshy Souls and Bony Spirits. Like the constant Pokemon RPGs, developers Level-5 Watch maintain…
I really loved Titanfall when it released back in 2014. It had so many great ideas and such a fun multiplayer component that I was truly saddened to see the player base erode as quickly as it did. It seems developer Respawn were paying attention because they’ve worked hard to address many of the original game’s…
I hate Battlefield 1. I hate it in spite of its being lovingly made, gorgeous to look at and deeply respectful in the way it handles its subject matter. I hate it despite its decision to steep itself in a period of conflict so barbaric that video games have shied away from it almost altogether until…
Civilization 6 is the latest in Sid Meier’s 25-year-old franchise of global growth and domination and, while it doesn’t rest on its laurels, neither does it strive to do anything especially different to its predecessors. In any other game, this would be considered the height of laziness. In Civilization‘s case, its surprising to find that minimal…
Masterpiece isn’t a word you should throw around willy nilly, particularly when you’re looking to describe a video game, but Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim certainly fits the bill. It won over critics and fans alike with its craggy, unforgiving landscape, its vast array of skills and abilities, and its willingness to embrace the mod community….
Let’s get it out of the way early: Tomb Raider has a lot to thank Uncharted for. Well, the current rebooted Tomb Raider anyway. This isn’t your childhood Lara Croft. She may have come first but when Crystal Dynamics launched their new, hardened Lara in 2013, it was pretty obvious they were channeling Naughty Dog. But…
Nintendo’s flagship character has always enjoyed a tighter focus when it comes to his many, many spin-offs. You can always be sure that a Mario game (or any related title) will be held to a particularly high standard by the business, Nintendo and its developers being very careful to control the quality for their primary…
Dragon Quest is one of the most venerable franchises in the history of video game role players. In its homeland of Japan, the series has spent its lifetime frequently and handily beating the sales all other comers, even genre titans like Final Fantasy, but in recent years has seen a bit of a drop off as…
GOOOAAAAL. With the usual patronising phrasework out of the way, let’s talk about football.
Alright, look. I’m going to level with you right away: I don’t know anything about Formula 1 racing. Why then, you might ask, am I the one reviewing the year’s premiere F1 title? The short answer is because I like throwing myself into games I don’t have a frame of reference for and seeing if they surprise…
After spending the last six months as a PC exclusive, XCOM 2 has finally arrived on consoles. With everything going on in the world of gaming and VR, it has taken some time to finally dig into the game and enjoy it while sharing a few little comparisons to its PC counterpart which was released…
I wasn’t really expecting to like Gears of War 4 as much as I did. The Gears series is frequently everything that bores me in modern action games — template-like, gravel-voiced roid bros charging headfirst into military fist-bumps excessive chainsaw-related gore. The series also found its formula from the jump and didn’t deviate far from it over…
It took a few years for gamers outside of Japan to finally see the modern remake of Dragon Quest VII: Fragments of the Forgotten Past, a reverent update of one of the longest, most in-depth, and sadly underrated JRPGs of the 21st century. It was originally released for PlayStation in the year 2000, a huge…
12 years. 12 years is a long time to carry an MMO, or any game at all. I should know, I’ve been playing the thing since launch. Having learnt from some of the mistakes made in Warlords of Draenor, Blizzard have ensured that expansion 6 of World of Warcraft takes the game in a very…
Basketball is one of the few American sports I follow zealously. A long-time Celtics fan (you heard me, wannafightaboudit), I find myself with a love-dread relationship with basketball video games. NBA 2K17 comes loaded for bear with an involved My Career mode that gets right to heart of my idiosyncratic relationship to these games.
GOD, I love the Forza Horizon series. It’s everything I want in a racing game — a balance of work hard/play hard — race now, then go where you like, in whatever car you want and just enjoy the act of doing that. It’s a total breath of fresh air, especially after the endless procession of staid, serious…
Just Sing is the latest entry in the storied genre of video games that involves singing at your television and have it grade your abilities with cold, unfeeling science. Singstar dominated the genre (and sales charts) back in the PS2 era, but no karaoke game since has managed to crack the code the way Singstar did. Just Sing gives it…
It gets me giddy with excitement when developers like Q-Games steps outside the norm to try something original. The Tomorrow Children is so far from their usual fan-fare of PixelJunk titles you would think they have a pretty damn good reason to try and bring something original to their line-up. On the concept itself, they…
There was a period between 2002 and 2007, lets call it the post-Ocarina of Time era, where action adventure games found a formula that worked and then stuck to it like glue. A plucky protagonist visits many, varied locations, delves into dungeons, collect treasure and items, upgrades their skills and eventually finds themselves in a showdown with…
Monster Hunter, Capcom’s hunter-gatherer action RPG series, has stuck around for quite a few years, first appearing on PlayStation systems with inventive, straight-forward gameplay and a winning formula: prep for quests, head out on quests, and complete those quests, usually by bagging and tagging magnificent Jurassic-inspired beasts. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right?
