Staff Profile
- Username
- johncalmc
- First Article
- News/Features
- 5
- Reviews
- 52
- Avg. Review Score
- 6.4
- Article Comments
- 1,167
- Total Articles
- 57
Review Frostpunk - Alternate History City Builder Survives Against The Odds
Colder than the other side of the pillow
Here's a little bit of history for you: back in the year 1883 the volcano Krakatoa erupted, and spewed millions of tonnes of ash and molten rock into the atmosphere. There was so much of the stuff up there that sunlight actually struggled to reach the planet's surface and global temperatures cooled...
Review Tropico 6 - Dictator Simulator Brings The Goods
It's-a me, Tropico
Tropico 6 is a political strategy game that puts you in control of a tropical island nation, and asks you to maintain power by any and all means necessary. Assassinations, bribes, rigged elections - it's pretty much a Kim Jong-il simulator, only with an irritating-at-first-but-you'll-be-humming-it-later mambo soundtrack. Perhaps...
Review The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan - An Unexplosive Opening
Until yawn
Maybe it's just because our Dad let us watch Jaws when we were six, but we've always been skeptical of the sea. It's wet, and there's weird things in there. Man of Medan – from Until Dawn dev Supermassive Games, and the first in an anthology of horror games falling under the Dark Pictures banner – sees four friends foolishly heading...
Review Black Desert - Ugly Technical Issues Hamper Pretty MMO
Black Sheep
For the uninitiated, Black Desert is an MMO that supplants the standard combat that you'd expect to see in a game like World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV with an action-based battle system more akin to a really low-budget God of War. It takes place in one fairly sizeable open world map rather than lots of smaller ones joined together...
Review Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night - The Finest Castlevania Game Never Made
Oh what a night
And breathe. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night – the long-awaited Koji Igarashi-helmed spiritual successor to Castlevania: Symphony of the Night – is finally here. After a worryingly long gestation period, some Kickstarter troubles, and numerous delays, we were concerned that Bloodstained was destined to disappoint. Fortunately,...
Review Warhammer: Chaosbane - Dull Diablo Clone Doesn't Deliver
Borehammer
Imagine a fantasy action role playing game in which you must guide a wizard or warrior on a heroic quest through dozens of wonderfully realised locales, battle a cavalcade of foul creatures, loot their rotten remains for rewarding new gear, and eventually go toe-to-toe with fearsome and challenging bosses. And then imagine you can play...
Review Observation - Space Survival Story with Some Surprises
I'm just looking, I'm not spyin'
Space is kinda terrifying when you think about it. It can be unsettling taking the wrong turn in Wales and winding up surrounded by fields and sheep with nothing but your SatNav for company -- imagine being trapped on a space station and looking out of your window to see nought but the immeasurable black void staring...
Review Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy - Three Classic Adventures That Stand the Test of Time
I hereby sentence you to play these games
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy is a bundle of the first three Phoenix Wright games, originally released on Game Boy Advance and then later revamped for Nintendo DS, making their way to a PlayStation console for the very first time. These classic adventure/visual novel titles follow a rookie defence...
Hands On Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy Has No Objections from Us So Far
Pre-order in the court?
We're a mere three cases into the original Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney on PlayStation 4, so we're not quite ready to give you the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. So help us Shuhei, the jury is still out. But we have seen enough to allow us to make a pretty compelling opening statement before we render our...
Review Vane - Exploration Has Never Been Less Fun
You're so vane I'll bet you think this review is about you
We were something like six hours into Vane when we glanced down at our phone to see what time it was, and realised that we'd only been playing the game for forty-two minutes. How was this even possible? It was like when Matthew McConaughey visited Dr. Miller's Planet in Interstellar: a world...
Review YIIK: A Postmodern RPG - Party Like It's 1999
Let's all meet up in the year 2000
The '90s. It was a wonderful time to be alive. An era before TOWIE, before PewDiePie, and before Ed Sheeran. Sheffield United were in the Premier League (briefly). We had it all. Pulp Fiction at the cinema, Oasis and Blur being horrible to each other every day, Curly Wurly's were like twice the size. It was...
Game of the Year 2018 #7 - Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom
All cel and good
Aside from the thoroughly charming cel-shaded aesthetic and good-natured storytelling, Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom bears little resemblance to its 2011 predecessor: the cast of characters is entirely new, the battle system has been completely revamped, and there’s huge focus placed on a city building minigame. It’s one of...
Game of the Year 2018 John's Personal Picks
Boy!
The annual Push Square Towers tradition is back, as we sit down our scribes and pester them once more for their five favourite PlayStation games of the year. With such a strong assortment of software in 2018, it’s always tough deciding upon the cream of the crop. We threatened John with a David Cage shower scene before he dropped his list...
Review Just Cause 4 - Explosive in the Wrong Ways
Just bores
There's moments playing Just Cause 4 when you'll almost certainly find yourself grinning from ear to ear in much the same way that you might watching a ridiculous '80s action movie. It doesn't matter that the characters are personified clichés, or that the plot's limper than the lettuce in a Big Mac, because you just strapped four...
Review Hitman 2 - More Darkly Amusing Murder
Hit me baby one more time
Poor Sierra Knox. She lived her life as a successful racing car driver, and along with her father was a powerful figure within Kronstadt Industries, a tech firm making waves in the robotics field. She had it all: fame, money, power, and a name that made her sound a bit like a baddie from a Bond film. It's everything a girl...
Review Valkyria Chronicles 4 - The Strategy Sequel We Waited a Decade For
The Art of War
Republished on the 25th September, 2018: We're bringing this review back to coincide with the launch of Valkyria Chronicles 4. The Valkyria Chronicles series is set during a low fantasy re-imagining of World War II, here called the Second Europan War. The topography of the Europan continent is only marginally different to our Europe,...
Review Divinity: Original Sin II - Definitive Edition
Master of Divinity
Divinity: Original Sin II is a fantastic role-playing game that strikes an almost perfect balance between dense, absorbing storytelling, and allowing you the freedom to shape the adventure as you wish. The journey through to the end credits will take you dozens of hours to complete, and during that time you’ll meet scores of...
Iver bad feeling about this
The Banner Saga 3 is a fitting end for the light tactical RPG series, and one that feels less like a sequel and more like the third act of a cohesive whole. The combat system used in the series up until this point remains relatively unchanged, and most of the mechanics are carried over as is. This isn't about reinventing...
Put the kids to bed
The first twenty minutes or so of The Lost Child set up an intriguing mystery, but once the game settles into a comfortable rhythm things become decidedly less compelling, and at times, an outright slog. The game begins in a Tokyo subway station with an investigative journalist who specialises in the occult named Hayato looking...
Review Jurassic World Evolution
Life, uh, finds a way
In the original Jurassic Park movie when things start going a little bit pear shaped, the perennially optimistic benefactor of the world's first dinosaur zoo John Hammond reminds everyone that when Disneyland opened none of the rides worked properly either. Mathematician Dr. Ian Malcolm cynically retorts: "Yeah, but, John, if...
Loving the alien
Republished on Wednesday 30th May 2018: We're bringing this review back from the archives following the announcement of June's PlayStation Plus lineup. The original text follows. When aliens landed on Earth in 2012 strategy game XCOM: Enemy Unknown, it was up to you to unite the people of our planet against the invading...
Pinball Wizard
Because many video games lean on familiar gameplay loops, archetypal characters, and genre conventions, when you're reviewing them it can sometimes feel like you're saying exactly the same thing about a game that you already wrote about previously. But every now and again you'll have to write a sentence during a review that you know...
Past caring
Past Cure tells the story of an ex-soldier named Ian who is suffering from a bout of amnesia pertaining to a three year period in his life, after which he wound up with some extraordinary abilities. He, naturally, wants to know what happened to him in that time and why he can now do things that mere mortal men cannot, and with the help...
Review Dissidia Final Fantasy NT
Shut the hell up, kupo
There are few franchises in video gaming quite like Final Fantasy. After three decades, the series has spawned more iconic characters and cities than most other franchises could hope to achieve in twice as long. The appeal, therefore, of a game like Dissidia Final Fantasy NT should be self-explanatory: take a bunch of...
