Review by Matt S. Here’s the thing: I like fighting games a great deal. I like the aesthetics of fighting games. I like the narratives that they throw up. I like speed, action, and excitement of them. I’ve spent hundreds of hours playing my favourite examples of the genres; Dead…
Read MoreReview by Matt C. MechRunner is an endless runner with guns and and a Transformer-like robot that can shift between tank and bipedal forms. That isn’t necessarily a recipe for a great game, but it should at least be a recipe for a bit of mindless fun. Unfortunately, MechRunner only…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. Games academic, Ian Bogost, recently wrote a piece that proved to be controversial. In it, he laid out some of the issues in the way that game creators often try to tell stories using similar narrative structures to what those in literature and film have traditionally…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. I have played – and loved – a lot of visual novels over the years. There are the VNs that mix with other genres, such as Danganronpa, 999, Eiyuu Senki and Tears to Tiara, and I love them all. Then there are the “true” VNs, where…
Read MoreReview by Moshe R. The magical mystery tour is here, finally, and it took me away. At least that’s The Beatles inspired feeling I experienced as I started playing Vignettes on my iPad, with its very Warhol choice of colour palettes, atmospheric music and minimalistic presentation. As well as it…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. The original Dragon Quest Heroes was a delightful game, but in comparison to what Koei Tecmo and Square Enix have pulled off with this sequel, it looks more like a proof of concept than anything else. It’s genuinely incredible how the developer team has managed to…
Read MoreReview by Harvard L. Sometimes the indie scene catches you by surprise. Whether by novel gameplay mechanic, unexpected plot twist or affecting graphical style, the best indie games manage to make the player stop and say “well, I’ve never seen that before”. In Polish indie duo Lichthund’s Lichtspeer, that moment…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. Both Puyo Puyo and Tetris are action puzzle games in which you need to create specific combinations of objects as they fall down a well-like container, in order to make them disappear and prevent the well from filling up. Despite that similarity, before playing Puyo Puyo…
Read MoreReview by Brad L. Wonder Boy was one of the first video games I had ever played. I owned it on the old Commodore 64, and despite that version being inferior to the arcade and Master System editions. I did spend countless hours on it. Same goes with its sequel,…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. It’s no secret that I’m not the world’s biggest fan of MOBAs and other eSports-like games. It’s not to say that I don’t appreciate what they do, it’s just that they’ve never offered gameplay that hooks me in particularly well. I’ve tried the main ones –…
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