Latest Reviews
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 Synth Riders (PSVR) – A VR Rhythm Game with a Different Sound
Ride the rails
We have espoused the virtues of VR rhythm games before, and now we have a new title to add to the mix: Synth Riders. While mechanically similar to Beat Saber on the surface, Synth Riders has some notable exceptions that allow it to stand out. Our favorite of these features are “rails”, in which you keep your hand balanced on a...
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 Dodgeball Academia (PS4) - Punchy Sports RPG Is Top Class
Dodge this
There's so much to like about the cheerful, colourful RPG that is Dodgeball Academia. You play as Otto, a determined young man who enrols in a prestigious dodgeball institution, with ambitions of becoming the best of the best. Everything at the academy revolves around the cartoonishly violent sport, and over the course of the game, you'll...
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 Omno (PS4) - A Lovingly Crafted Adventure That Journey Fans Won't Want to Miss
Omyes
Omno is an enchanting little game where you traverse a series of reasonably large environments, solving enjoyable puzzles along the way. You play as a kind of pilgrim — a staff-bearing being who is tasked with following the light. The light, in this case, is an energy source of sorts, scattered across the aforementioned environments...
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...
Mini Review Cotton Reboot! (PS4) - Spooky Cute-'Em-Up's an Elaborate and Accessible 2D Shooter
Bless your Cotton shmups
Even if you're in the middle of a scorching summer, there are games that remind you of other seasons, and with a story that follows Cotton as a broomstick riding witch, PS4 Cotton Reboot! conjures up images of moonlit autumn nights. It's Cotton's sweet tooth, and love of candy wrapped WILLOW, which persuades her over seven...
Mini Review Winds & Leaves (PSVR) – A Silviculturists Dream in Virtual Reality
Planting the seed
Post-apocalyptic games are dime a dozen, but you’ve never played one like this. In Winds & Leaves, rather than punch or shoot your way to safety, you are tasked with re-planting the once vibrant forests of a distant land. You accomplish this by picking fruit from freshly grown trees and then placing them right back into the...
Tussled sprouts
Republished on Wednesday 28th July 2021: We're bringing this review back from the archives following the announcement of August's PlayStation Plus lineup. The original text follows. Plants vs. Zombies has come a long way since its humble beginnings as a tower defence game. After developer PopCap was acquired by EA, the studio...
Review Tennis World Tour 2 (PS4) - A Winner
Match point
Republished on Wednesday 28th July 2021: We're bringing this review back from the archives following the announcement of August's PlayStation Plus lineup. The original text follows. Tennis games tend to be a lot of fun, but even the best ones struggle to capture the intricacy of the sport. In franchises like Virtua Tennis, the emphasis...
Mini Review Night Book (PS4) - Interactive Horror Is More Funny Than Scary
Booking hell
Uh oh, Dad's possessed. What rotten luck! Here you are, heavily pregnant and living in a crummy apartment in Croydon, and your fiancé Pearce has inexplicably decided to jet off to the other side world on business when you need him most. Never mind, Pearce has a plan. He's installed security cameras all over the apartment so the police...
Review Samurai Warriors 5 (PS4) - Rebooted Hack and Slasher Is Fantastic Fun, for the Most Part
Incident at Honnoji
It's been seven whole years since the last mainline instalment in the Samurai Warriors series, and as far as we're concerned, 2014's Samurai Warriors 4 is still one of the best Warriors games on the market. Samurai Warriors 5 has quite the legacy to live up to, then, but is a rebooted storyline, a fresh art style, and a slew of...
Badge of honour
The World Ends With You launched in 2007 on Nintendo DS and quickly gained a cult following despite that year being packed with a seemingly endless supply of classics. Designed by Kingdom Hearts director Tetsuya Nomura, it was a darker variant of the usual Square Enix RPG formula. Taking a modern setting, a prescient focus on memetic...
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...
