It hasn’t been easy to choose as a Game of the Year for 2019. This has been a pivotal year for the games industry. With new consoles on the horizon, and several high profile AAA titles delaying into early 2020, independent games have been able to take the spotlight in a big way. The games…
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I’ve heard it suggested that the Dark Souls series is a modern take on the Metroidvania genre, and I generally think that’s correct. There are many parallels, from exploration and frequent backtracking, specific save locations, the memorisation of enemy patterns, slow power creep and subtle environmental storytelling. Developers The Game Kitchen have taken this comparison…
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I was only a few hours into my journey in The Outer Wilds, and I’d already run a gamut of emotions. I’d felt it all — anticipation, elation, awe, loneliness, dread and abject horror. None of it was planned, all of it occurred as a result of my own decisions and, often, my own hubris….
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A non-trivial amount of my time as a teenager was spent playing Black Isle Studios RPGs. The entry point for many into the Forgotten Realms campaign setting that is the focus of Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons, games like Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale remain important industry touchstones. The foundations they laid for creating complex…
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The Station, a first person explore-em-up that’s had us thinking most of the morning. A derelict space station. A stern warning about interfering in research. Signs of a struggle. Strange things are afoot at the orbital Circle-K.
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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….
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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…
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Written by author Ken Follett in his 1989 novel, The Pillars of the Earth is a wildly popular story about the building of a cathedral in a small town in 12th century England. It is a long and sweeping story, and one of the most popular literary works of the last two decades. It also makes…
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It’s always a bit an event when Valve’s Steam store drops one of their huge sales. As expected, there are deep discounts across a massive number of games from new releases to old favourites.
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What a year it’s been for gaming. The surge of fantastic indie titles shows no signs of slowing and, after a horror year in 2014, the AAA side of the industry has made a clear effort to pick itself up by the bootstraps and deliver titles of quality. There was a lot to like out…
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Cloud Imperium Games, the developers behind the highly anticipated, crowded funded space sim Star Citizen, delivered the game’s biggest update yet on the 12th of December. Scheduled for a full release sometime in 2016, the arrival of the Alpha 2.0 update brings players of Star Citizen the “first true slice” of gameplay experience from the…
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It’s usually an agonisingly long time between issues for Valve’s ongoing, hysterically funny comic based on Team Fortress 2. Usually released once every six months, Issue #5 has arrived out of nowhere and it’s a doozy.
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Valve’s free-to-play shooter Team Fortress 2 has received its latest annual update, called the Gun Mettle update. It arrives this week and will bring a pile of new weapons, three fresh maps, new taunts and a brand new contract system to the game, in addition to a number of tweaks to all eight classes.
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