PS5 Game Reviews
Mini Review F.I.S.T.: Forged in Shadow Torch (PS5) - Awesome Metroidvania Punches Above Its Weight
Show me the bunny
The absurdly titled F.I.S.T.: Forged In Shadow Torch begins in Torch City; a dirty, dieselpunk dystopia, inhabited by anthropomorphic animals, and a few years prior to the beginning of the game invaded by the robotic Legion and their 'Iron Dog' army. Our hero is a gruff rabbit named Rayton - a former ace pilot in a slump,...
Mini Review Kitaria Fables (PS5) - Charming Animal Adventure Combines Action with Crafting
The cat that crafted the cream
Kitaria Fables is a charming action RPG with an emphasis on crafting of all kinds. It takes place in a world inhabited by anthropomorphic characters, and the whole thing would be incredibly cosy if it wasn't for the fact that monsters roam the countryside. There is a story here — one that involves an empire, the...
Review WRC 10 (PS5) - Rough-Edged But Robust Rally Racing
Don't cut
Developer KT Racing has found its footing with the WRC series. After last year's WRC 9 made significant improvements to the officially licensed rally racer, WRC 10 iterates on the winning formula, presenting another fantastic experience — even if it is a little rough around the edges. The driving itself is of course the most important...
Mini Review The Medium (PS5) - One of the Best Horror Experiences on PS5
Anything but medium
With all the rumours about Bloober Team potentially working on a new Silent Hill game, it's easy to forget why the team rose to fame in the first place. Its most recent project, The Medium, has finally made the jump to the PS5 and it could very well be the best psychological horror experience on the console. The story follows...
Mini Review Overcooked: All You Can Eat - Remastered Culinary Co-Op Is Still a Tasty Treat
Fill your plates
Republished on Wednesday 1st September 2021: We're bringing this review back from the archives following the announcement of September's PlayStation Plus lineup. The original text follows. Overcooked: All You Can Eat is like enjoying your favourite meal while wearing newly prescribed glasses. Sure, you've had this plenty of times...
Mini Review Rustler (PS5) - Silly Medieval Sandbox Houses Enjoyable Old-School GTA Clone
Tis but a scratch
For as iconic as Grand Theft Auto unquestionably is, it often feels like its PS1 origins have been resigned to the past. Titles like Shakedown Hawaii have attempted to recapture Rockstar’s early isometric days, but since the developer’s very own GTA: Chinatown Wars, there’s been a real dearth of top-down open worlds. Rustler...
Review Aliens: Fireteam Elite (PS5) - Competent Co-Op That Entertains But Is At Odds with Itself
Prep for dust off, we need immediate evac
To say that video game adaptations of the Alien franchise are hit and miss is a bit of an understatement. On the one hand, we have genre-defining classics like Alien vs Predator (1999) and Alien: Isolation. Then there's Aliens: Colonial Marines, a release besmirched by industry lies. Isolation succeeded by...
Mini Review Hoa (PS5) - Good Vibes Only for Pretty Platformer
Ghibli? I don't know her
Hoa feels like one of those games designed purely to put a smile on your face. From Skrollcat Studio, it's a vibrant and colourful 2D platformer that revels in its simplicity. There's nothing challenging about it, nothing that will put your brain to the test. The game is designed as something you can put your feet up for and...
Mini Review RiMS Racing (PS5) - Attempt for a More Realistic Motorcycle Sim Falls Flat
This bike needed more time in the pit stop
As the racing genre strives towards being as immersive as possible, the added realism can sometimes come at the cost of being enjoyable. RiMS Racing is the perfect example of this, as to simulate what it is like to be a motorcycle racer, the game adds tedious elements of motorcycle maintenance that ruin an...
Review Madden NFL 22 (PS5) - Franchise Finally Gets Some TLC in Improved American Football Sim
Throw it in rotation
Prior to the release of the disappointing Madden NFL 21, publisher EA Sports made a promise to series stalwarts that it would improve Franchise in future entries. The lack of improvements to the popular campaign mode in last year’s entry was the straw that broke the camel’s back for many fans, and it triggered a series of...
Mini Review Recompile (PS5) - Digital Metroidvania Has Style But Little Substance
Hacked
Recompile is one of those games that shows extremely well, but the reality is an experience that doesn't quite stick the landing. Playing as a virus with the intent of infiltrating and fixing The Mainframe, a computer system that's gone awry, this is a 3D action game that looks great, but doesn't quite have enough to back it up. The...
Sharpened steel
Before we begin: If you're looking for an overview of the base game, check out our in-depth Ghost of Tsushima PS4 review. All of the points that we made in that review also apply to Ghost of Tsuhima: Director's Cut. In this review, we're concentrating on what's new. Ghost of Tsushima: Director's Cut revitalises Sucker Punch's open...
Mini Review I Am Dead (PS5) - Posthumous Puzzler Is a Bittersweet Treat
Dead and loving it
I Am Dead is a quirky puzzle adventure game in which you play as Morris Lupton, the deceased curator of a museum in the island town of Shelmerston. It's an unusual premise, but it's one that developer Hollow Ponds pulls off with style and care. A game about tracking down ghosts and learning about inhabitants of the island could've...
Mini Review Foreclosed (PS5) - Cool Comicbook Framing Can't Mask Careless Gameplay
Shut it down
Foreclosed is a story-driven, third-person shooter set in a cyberpunk world where people are augmented with implants at birth. As a result, inhabitants are essentially corporation property as soon as they leave the womb, and this unsettling thought is at the heart of the game's narrative. You play as Evan Kapnos, a rather generic...
Out of the black box
Assassin's Creed Valhalla's second expansion, The Siege of Paris, sees Eivor travel across the channel to Francia. As per usual, our intrepid Norse hero is eager to establish some new alliances — with both Viking raiders and King Charles the Fat on Eivor's list of potential allies. What follows is a much more gritty and...
Review Hades (PS5) - Who Knew Escaping Hell Would Be So Heavenly?
Say amen, there he goes again
Reviewing Hades in 2021 almost feels redundant. The game's been available on other platforms since September of last year, and has garnered heaps of praise and awards in the months it's taken to appear on Sony's systems. You probably already know what we're going to say about Supergiant's rogue-lite action game, because...
Mini Review Button City (PS5) - A Cute Adventure, But That's About It
Animal arcade
Button City is an adorable little game about a cast of cutesy animal buddies and their arcade-going adventures. Playing as Fennel the fox, you're new to town and wind up friends with a trio of regulars at the titular arcade. It's all extremely sweet, with a simple but heart-warming story keeping things moving along. The trouble is,...
Review The Forgotten City (PS5) - Skyrim Mod Turned Full Game Tells a Good Story
I used to be a time traveller like you
Turning a Skyrim mod into a full game is an impressive feat on its own, but to then make it something worth playing is a whole different ball game. The Forgotten City, from developer Modern Storyteller, feels a lot like The Elder Scrolls titles of years past. However, contrasting the main quest of Tamriel's...
Mini Review The Falconeer: Warrior Edition (PS5) - Bird Is the Word in Fun Flight Sim
Beware, sky hunter, beware
We’ve always wanted to ride a bird. No, not like that. Grow up. We meant, quite literally, ride on the back of a large avian like something out of The Rescuers Down Under. The Falconeer — making its PlayStation 5 debut after an acclaimed run on Xbox systems — attempts to allow us to live out this bizarre dream with...
Review Last Stop (PS5) - English Escapade Is a Cracker, Innit
Get the London look
Simulating the mundane and ordinary is usually something games give a wide berth. After all, how do you fit bullets and explosions into the run-of-the-mill careers most people use to support their families? It doesn't really work, but then there are those who don't conform to the rules. Virginia developer Variable State is the...
Mini Review Cris Tales (PS5) - Enchanting RPG Inspired By the Classics
Let’s do the time warp again
Cris Tales is an absolutely gorgeous game that's heavily inspired by classic RPGs such as Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger, while also managing to put its own unique spin on things. The game’s protagonist, Crisbell, is a young orphan who acquires a magical time crystal which shows her a vision of the future where...
Review Watch Dogs Legion: Bloodline (PS5) - A Much Better Plot Built on Existing Foundations
London's falling
A little over six months since its PlayStation 5 debut, Watch Dogs Legion is undoubtedly in a better place. Make no mistake, this ambitious but ultimately flawed open world jaunt through futuristic London is still let-down by the weight of its own ideas, but Ubisoft – as the French publisher is wont to do – has worked tirelessly...
Review F1 2021 (PS5) - Great Additions Make This the Best, and Most Accessible, F1 Sim
Put your pedal to the Vettel
As a general rule, annual sports games get just that little bit better with each passing year, and that's certainly true for Codemasters' Formula One series. The officially licensed sim racer has been gradually improving each summer, and with F1 2021, the studio has made some wonderful additions that make this year's...
Mini Review Where the Heart Leads (PS5) - A Surreal Slice of Life
Is this surreal life? Is this just fantasy?
Life can be pretty tedious, which is why we invented video games. Where the Heart Leads is a video game about life which successfully recreates the tedium of being alive, but only takes the best part of twenty hours to finish rather than seventy-odd years. So, that's one in the plus column. The game...
Mini Review A Plague Tale: Innocence (PS5) - Rats a Good Next-Gen Upgrade
French fancies
Would it be a push to call A Plague Tale: Innocence an overlooked gem? We don't think so; what Asobo Studio achieved on PlayStation 4 deserved a lot more recognition. The somewhat historical tale of Amicia and younger brother Hugo can hold its own amongst many of the greats, and while its stealth-based gameplay may prove formulaic for...
Plus one
It has been nearly four years since Doki Doki Literature Club took the Internet by storm. Originally released as a freeware game on PC, the game garnered a cult following, with fans begging for a sequel ever since. While Doki Doki Literature Club Plus is not a sequel, this new version aims to bring the core game to consoles for the first...
Review Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance (PS5) - Unashamedly Old-School Hack-and-Slash
Dungeon Master or dungeon past-it?
Think of Dark Alliance in gaming terms and your mind probably drops back to the recently re-released local-lite-looter Baldur’s Gate: (yes!) Dark Alliance. You’d be forgiven for assuming that Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance – effectively Dark Alliance 3, we suppose – would retain its knockabout and...
Ride the fire
Guilty Gear has always been massively underappreciated as a fighting game series. The franchise, which first threw punches on the original PlayStation all the way back in 1998, has steadily accumulated an incredibly loyal fanbase over the last couple of decades, but it's never been able to crack a more mainstream crowd. And that's a...
Mini Review Chicory: A Colorful Tale (PS5) - Painterly Puzzler Is Almost Perfect
An easel recommendation
Sometimes the world can feel colourless. Yet when we attempt to add some of our own — a splash of vivid red across, for example, a bus shelter — we're on the wrong side of a vandalism charge. So to the escapist world of gaming we once again turn, leaping into this absolute charmer about the emotional burden of creativity...
Mini Review The Persistence Enhanced (PS5) - Survival Horror Roguelite Still Rocks
Returnal
Before there was Returnal, there was The Persistence. Being tethered to PlayStation VR at launch, Firesprite’s roguelite sci-fi survival horror never quite got the attention it deserved, but it was a well-executed marriage of genres. Set aboard an abandoned deep-space colony ship overrun by a mutated crew, you find yourself revived by the...