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. Nintendo’s pivot towards LEGO-like entertainment experiences has been a joy to behold. Between the AR Mario Kart, Labo, and now Game Builder Garage, Nintendo is out there encouraging kids to be creative, to design things, and to learn important thought processes and logic as they have…
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. It’s quite incredible to consider just how far the Fate series has come. It started out as a single niche visual novel with some roaring-good sex scenes (which, to this day, has never been formally localised into English) and has grown to become a major multimedia…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. I knew that I would love Aluna from its opening moments. The game kicks off with a cutscene talking about Zeus and Hercules, before saying (and yes, I am paraphrasing here) “but you know what? Let’s talk about this South American goddess and her daughter instead”.…
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…
Read MoreReview by Harvard L. Wicce is, unfortunately, not good. It’s got a lot of things going for it at first – a pleasing, hand-drawn art style, engrossing monster design and a captivating dark fairytale aesthetic. But its main problem is its strict adherence to being a standard platformer/brawler, partaking in…
Read MoreInterview by Matt S. Sumire is one of the biggest surprises and biggest delights of 2021. This heartfelt (and heartrending) little story about a girl filled with regrets and hurt is a powerful reflection on spirituality, humanity, sadness, warmth and hope. It’s a game that will make you cry, but…
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