Review by Matt S. It’s difficult to shake the notion that Nintendo and the developers that it works with are not quite sure what to do with Metroid. The formula is, of course, of an excellent standard. An entire genre (i.e. the “Metroidvania”) doesn’t get named after a game that…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. When you have a moment spare, go and look at a picture of the Gamecube controller. Take a close look at the analogue sticks. Notice something? If your response was “the case around the stick has eight little ridges”, then you’re looking at the biggest problem…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. In many ways, I prefer Judgment to Yakuza. This is by no means a slight directed towards my beloved Yakuza, but the mobster film tradition that that series taps into is just not as interesting to me as the noirish thriller that was Judgment. Now that…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. I barely remember the BloodRayne Betrayal I played back on the PlayStation 3. When I heard that there was going to be a remaster of it, just two things came to mind: firstly that it was brutally difficult and that it was one of the most…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. Auteur theory, and whether it should be applied to video games, is one of those more interesting debates that we can have about this medium. Most of the time it’s difficult to identify a single person as being responsible for the creativity in a game; the…
Read MoreReview by Harvard L. There’s that rare beautiful moment when playing a scrolling shooter where the speed and the tension fade away, and the player is suspended in a perfect state of flow. I get this feeling on the rare occasions that I make it past Stage 2 on Gradius,…
Read MoreReview by Harvard L. From its beginning, Boomerang X seems like it’d be a pretty unassuming game – the player washes up on a beach, comically tosses away a survival knife, and finds a four-bladed weapon (it looks more like a shuriken, but the game’s called Boomerang X so we’ll…
Read MorePreview by Matt S. I’ve finally been able to get some hands-on time with the console (PlayStation 4) version of Samurai Warriors 5. As my favourite series within the Musou genre (one of my favourite genres), I’ve been aching for a go as other critics have been previewing it on…
Read MoreReview by Harvard L. My first few levels of SHING! were spent battling with my fingers to try and wrap around this game’s bizarre control scheme. It’s a brawler where the left stick moves and the right stick is used for attacks – flick in a horizontal direction to jab,…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. This review is going to be pretty negative, so there’s something I want to say up front: I think that it is a wonderful thing that Nintendo published DC Super Hero Girls: Teen Power. There is a simple reality here that the big publishers do very…
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