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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The next expansion in the long-running World of Warcraft series is World of Warcraft: Shadowlands. Sylvanas has taken the crown of the Lich King, crowning herself the Lich Queen and doubling down on her seemingly endless downward spiral into madness and destruction. With the doorway to afterlife torn wide open, the expansion will allow players…
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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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Untitled Goose Game, the goose-based civilian torment simulator by Melbourne developer House House, will finally launch on September 20. In development for nearly three years, the game caught the internet’s attention for its exceedingly irreverent pitch — you are a goose and you mess with the life of a put-upon farmer just trying to go…
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Void Bastards is an independent space shooter produced by Blue Manchu, a studio based right here in Aus. While it borrows liberally from numerous science fiction games, it shares a great deal of conceptual space with roguelikes in the vein of FTL. Indeed, if one were so inclined, it would be easy to view Void…
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The final item on the EA Play livestreaming docket today was The Sims 4 and its new expansion pack, Island Living. It’s the expac for anyone that’s ever wanted to bail on the city and live on a beach. There’s island-centric jobs like dive instructor, lifeguard and fisherman, clothing, hobbies, animals (including DOLPHINS!!!) and more…
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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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Gris is pretty special experience. It’s a game with a lot to say, but never actually says a word out loud. Instead, Gris uses its strident, beautiful art style to convey its every thought — linework, animation and colour all have a part to play in this story about finding your way back from a…
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Warcraft III: Reforged is coming, and it’s easily one of the most exciting announcements BlizzCon has had in years. Fans have been waiting years for this particular reveal, to the extent that some began creating mods for Starcraft II that would allow them to play out their Warcraft III fantasies to their hearts content. However,…
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I told you. I bloody told you Warcraft III was coming back. During their keynote address at BlizzCon 2018, Blizzard Entertainment’s classic games team took to the stage to talk about what they’d been working on since completing last year’s StarCraft Remastered. Warcraft III Reforged revives the classic RTS series that gave birth to an…
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Epic Games’ Fortnite has quickly taken the world by storm following the launch of its Battle Royale mode in September last year. Its meteoric rise was bolstered by its rapid expansion to other platforms — initially on Windows PC, Mac OSX, Xbox One and PlayStation 4, and now on iOS and Android devices. Fortnite‘s popularity…
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Untitled Goose Game, the goose vs farmer trolling simulator from Melbourne developer House House, captured the internet’s imagination last year with its hilarious debut trailer. The biggest question that trailer failed to answer was “When can I play this, and why isn’t the answer ‘right now’?” The answer might be sooner than you think. House…
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It doesn’t take long for a laptop, even one in the gaming tier, to start feeling long in the tooth. On the PC, there’s no upper limit on the hardware required for optimal gaming performance, and this is often to the laptop’s detriment. Razer’s Core series has been trying to find a workaround for that…
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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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Broadly speaking, whenever a game receives an expansion pack, they tend to take that word”expansion” rather literally. Typically what they bring to the table is more of everything you could already do in the base game. More units, more characters, more places to visit, things to do. Civilization expansions take a very different approach. They…
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Heroes of the Storm feels like a place where Blizzard Entertainment can have fun with their own back catalogue. From the anime–inspired Mecha skins for Diablo III‘s Tyrael to the ever popular Deathwing variant for Overwatch‘s D.va, new Heroes skins give the impression that Blizzard is happy to have a little fun at their own expense. We got the chance to chat…
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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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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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You might remember a story we brought you last year about Blizzard Entertainment retiring the long-standing Battle.net name it used for its program launcher in favour of the more generic name, Blizzard Launcher. The story changed earlier this year when the Activision half of the Activision-Blizzard family declared it would be bringing the Destiny 2 beta…
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When I first heard about Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator on Twitter a few months ago, I must confess I thought it might have just been a meme designed to harvest irony likes. After discovering that not only was the game real, it was being developed and published by famed internet snark machine Game Grumps,…
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