I’m not the world’s biggest fan of first-person shooters, but People Can Fly’s Painkiller is one of the exceptions to that rule, thanks to its grim, gothic theme, great monster design, and furious pacing. It was like the developers blended Hexen (another of my small list of beloved shooters) and…
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As a rule of thumb, it’s a good thing when developers and publishers bring older games onto modern hardware. We’re used to the bigger budget games being remade and remastered endlessly at this point, but it’s even better when it’s the more obscure games that are saved from disappearing and…
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Every time Starship Troopers pops up as a topic, we get to “enjoy” the most surreal arguments on the Internet as a bunch of people argue that the film is not a satire of fascism, and that the book is not an argument for fascism. These are some of the…
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In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have played ArcRunner. While it looks the part of a cyberpunk dystopia, the game itself was clearly only ever going to be a roguelike shooter drenched in neon. While it’s easy to say that you shouldn’t criticise a game for not being something it never…
Read MoreReview by Matt R. What is the point of Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection? I’m honestly not sure. The store listing for it runs through all the usual buzzwords: “remastered in stunning detail”, “improved visuals and frame rate”, “DualSense wireless controller features”—none of which make any practical difference to two…
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Review by Matt S. Space Stella is a very strong candidate for the worst game that I have ever played. Every second with this thing makes me want to cut my fingers off, simply so that I have no way of ever playing it again. It’s almost worth sacrificing playing…
Read MoreReview by Matt R. Ask any fan what they like about Dishonored, Deus Ex, Thief, and the like—”immersive sims”, as they’re often referred to, because the game industry has a weird obsession with genre descriptors that are vague to the point of being meaningless unless you’re already familiar with them—and…
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 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 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…
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