Review 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…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. The ninja has become an almost mythological figure within Japanese history and culture. In reality, they were actually reasonably mundane; the ninja “tradition” has been born of a combination of spies that the samurai would use to keep an eye on one another, and guerrilla warrior…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. I went into Wing of Darkness expecting a cross between Liberation Maiden and Ace Combat. You pilot a giant suit of mech armour controlled by an empowered woman (that being the Liberation Maiden part) in aerial dogfights that are similar in style to Ace Combat. That…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. If you take Starship Troopers, and add a Japanese kaiju aesthetic, you get Earth Defense Force. If you then put it through a voxel art machine so it looks like LEGO, you get World Brothers. After Iron Rain from a couple of years ago did something…
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Review by Matt S. These days, I spend most of my time railing against the obsession that this industry has with content and game length. I don’t believe that it’s relevant to the quality or value of a game, and if we’re going to see games as…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. You do exactly what the box says in Space Commander: War and Trade. You trade stuff, and you go to war. In space. Where you’re a commander. The problem is that space is meant to be this big, open… universe… of adventure and promise and Space…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. “But optimism dribbles away when horror repeats.” I have no idea how good Tim Reed’s novel, Spider from the Well, is, but I came across this quote from that novel when researching Returnal, and I think it’s a perfect encapsulation of that game. Returnal is a…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. It’s not often you’ll find a game (or series) that you’re absolutely terrible at, but can still appreciate and enjoy. I do have one such series. Monster Hunter. I’ve always struggled to wrap my head around Capcom’s epic boss battle simulation, but I’ve also always appreciated…
Read MoreNews by Matt S. El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron was one of the real artsy games of the PlayStation 3/Xbox 360 era. In that it was wildly beautiful and thematically rich… and sold peanuts. That didn’t stop it from gaining a niche following though… and indeed I even remember…
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