Latest Reviews
Review The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles (PS4) - No Objections to This Spiffing Spin-Off
Industrial revelations
The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles is a collection containing two titles never before released in the West, finally receiving official localisations years after their initial Japan-only launches. While this spin-off duology does little to tamper with the series' established formula, it makes up for a lack of innovation by...
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...
Mini Review Akiba's Trip: Hellbound & Debriefed (PS4) - Remastered JRPG Is Fun But Flawed
Strip Tease
How time flies! The Akiba’s Trip series has been going for 10 years and to celebrate Acquire has remastered the first game in the series, which was previously only released on PSP in Japan. The game takes place in Akihabara, an area in Tokyo that is famous for its maid cafés and abundance of stores filled with manga, anime, and...
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...
Review Sniper Elite VR (PSVR) - Precision Shooting That Mostly Hits the Mark
Sniper, no sniping
Rebellion’s no stranger to virtual reality. Having remade Atari's classic Battlezone as a PSVR launch title and publishing Arca's Path two years later, it’s teamed up with Just Add Water for Sniper Elite VR. While PlayStation owners haven’t lacked for Sniper Elite entries — we’ve previously seen
Something completely different
The Procession to Calvary is one of the most unique games we've played in a long time. It's a point and click adventure in the mould of classics like Monkey Island or Broken Sword, in which you play as a murder-hungry warrior hellbent on finding and, er, murdering a religious tyrant named Heavenly Peter. As you'd...
Rabite stew
Legend of Mana was a weird game when it originally launched in 1999, and it's even weirder 22 years later. This is an action RPG where you essentially build your own adventure. Right from the start, you're given next to no guidance on where you are or what you need to do. Most players will find that there's barely a main story until...
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 WWE 2K Battlegrounds - Rubbish Wrestling and Microtransactions Galore
World Wrestling Spendertainment
Republished on Wednesday 30th June 2021: We're bringing this review back from the archives following the announcement of July's PlayStation Plus lineup. The original text follows. Honestly, there's something sinister about WWE 2K Battlegrounds. And no, we don't mean Bray Wyatt's creepy mask, or the grotesque...
Review A Plague Tale: Innocence - The Rats of Us
Drat
Republished on Wednesday 30th June 2021: We're bringing this review back from the archives following the announcement of July's PlayStation Plus lineup. The original text follows. A Plague Tale: Innocence is a Sony game without a Sony budget. Focus Home Interactive may not be a forum favourite, but with ambitious original properties like...
Review Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 - The Best CoD of the Generation
Bop to the BlOps
Republished on Wednesday 30th June 2021: We're bringing this review back from the archives following the announcement of July's PlayStation Plus lineup. The original text follows. Call of Duty had to do something in order to remain relevant. After a slew of yearly releases that failed to really move the needle, Call of Duty: Black...
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...
Mini Review Alex Kidd in Miracle World DX (PS4) - Who Thought This Game Needed a Remake?
Not a miracle worker
Before there was Sonic the Hedgehog, there was Alex Kidd, SEGA’s defacto Master System mascot. Once the blue blur took the spotlight in the ‘90s, Alex’s franchise was left as a relic of an older time, appearing only in a few compilations over the years. That was until a remake of the original game, Miracle World, was...
Bolt from the blue
Republished on Tuesday, 22nd June 2021: It’s been nearly two years since we first reviewed Olympic Games Tokyo 2020: The Official Video Game, and a lot has happened since then. SEGA’s decision to release this tie-in title several months prior to the intended start of the event in host nation Japan always struck us as strange,...
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 Minute of Islands (PS4) - A Short But Beautiful Island Trip
Ah, fresh air
Minute of Islands is a beautiful adventure game that's maybe less light-hearted than you think. While the outer appearance is wonderful — we love its cartoonish, hand-drawn style — the game quickly establishes a darker, sadder tone for its six-hour runtime. You play as Mo, a young girl who resides underground after a devastating...
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...
Review Ninja Gaiden: Master Collection (PS4) - Cut-Throat Action, Old-School Design
Ninja star
Ryu Hayabusa has been enjoying an early retirement ever since the Ninja Gaiden series was put on ice years ago. Team Ninja has been busying itself with the Nioh games in the meantime, a more deliberate style of action title that takes things in a different, yet more modern, direction. Ninja Gaiden: Master Collection brings Ryu back with...
Mini Review Jay and Silent Bob: Mall Brawl (PS4) - Mallrats Brawler with Nine NES Chapters Nootch
NESnootchie bickety bam beat-'em-up
Can a retro modern game be too retro for its own good? This is a question we asked ourselves while playing Interabang Entertainment's Jay and Silent Bob: Mall Brawl as a PS4 beat-'em-up restricted by the limitations of additionally being released on a cartridge for the original NES hardware. We also questioned...
Mini Review Tour de France 2021 (PS4) - Nacon Peddles Another Tactical Sports Sim
Battle of Brittany
Outside of fitness software like Zwift and VirZOOM, it’s hard to imagine how you can make a game about cycling entertaining. French studio Cyanide has been trying for several years now, and Tour de France 2021 is the culmination of its efforts so far, delivering a realistic simulation of the world’s third most-watched sporting...
Review Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (PS5) - Intergalactic Stunner Puts PS5's Power on Display
Lombax for good
If the Earth was in peril from intergalactic invaders and needed a game developer to save its ass, governments across the globe would turn to Insomniac Games. You can practically bank on the Burbank-based developer to deliver top-notch titles these days, and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is no exception. TL;DR: this PlayStation 5...
EDF! EDF! EDF!
We’ve seen several Earth Defense Force games on PS4, but World Brothers isn’t your normal fare. Offering a family friendly spinoff with voxel graphics, this third-person shooter takes us to Square Earth, where we find this world shattered by Dark Tyrant’s forces as several motherships appear, and it’s down to us to restore it...
Mini Review Song of Horror (PS4) - Scare-Free Horror Is Frighteningly Dull
Sighlent Hill
Song of Horror begins with Daniel — a former drunkard attempting to escape the financial ruin that the bottle has left him in — taking on an errand for his boss. It's one of those go-to-a-creepy-house-and-investigate type jobs that any sane individual who has ever seen a horror movie or played Resident Evil before would know to...
Mini Review Mighty Goose (PS5) - Bombastic 2D Shooter Is Really Good Fun, Despite Frustrations
Honk if you're brawny
Mighty Goose is a chaotic side-scrolling shooter in which you play as a cybernetically enhanced goose. This particularly aggressive bird is an intergalactic bounty hunter, and the game's loose plot takes you to a number of sci-fi locales as Goose brings justice to the baddies. It's all suitably dumb right from the word go, and...
Mini Review Operation: Tango (PS5) - Flawed But Fun Co-Op Espionage Action
Spy games
Operation: Tango has a great central premise; you and a buddy must work together in asymmetrical co-op to complete a globe-trotting set of covert missions. One plays the agent, while the other is the hacker, and you'll both play an integral role in saving the world from cyber-destruction. You both have different views on a given scenario,...