Heroes of Might and Magic is finally back, and I couldn’t be happier. This is one of my favourite franchises of all – I even have the entire, expanded board game adaptation of Heroes of Might and Magic 3 thanks to a very generous brother who bought the whole damn thing for me. The port of Heroes of Might and…
Tove Jansson’s Moomin characters long ago stepped outside the pure world of just their books; even when Jansson was alive she was experimenting with different forms such as comic strips and limited merchandise. That has extended into video games in the past with very mixed results, though I did rather…
Did you know that, while mazes are designed to confuse and confound…
After playing (and largely enjoying) the second Greedfall game in early access…
What if you were playing a JRPG where the combat system was actually a puzzle? That’s the best way to think of Thistlemine. On the surface, it looks like a simple indie JRPG, but you’ll realise that there’s something different about this one by the time you’ve run into your…
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The pitch for Republic of Pirates is straightforward enough: It’s a very light Anno, with a pirate theme. That should make it a pretty safe bet for a lot of folks out there, especially when it’s also priced as a very budget-friendly Anno. I’m not usually one to talk about…
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Here’s a note for all developers out there: If you’re going to locate your game in a period of history or legend, and especially if it’s one where there isn’t an abundance of choices, then make sure that you actually do something about that period of history or legend. Earlier…
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You know that feeling where a game leaves you feeling totally satisfied? That you enjoyed every single second of it, and it left you wanting more, not because it was incomplete but simply because it was just that good? And that there was not a second where you felt like…
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My very first Warriors game was Samurai Warriors 3. I know, I came to the series late. The critics kept calling them “button mashers” in reviews and that made them sound very unappealing to me. Stupid, naïve me. I only played Samurai Warriors 3 because Nintendo decided to publish it…
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Schools are creepy places, and it doesn’t seem to matter which country you’re talking about, they’re going to be one of the most common settings for horror stories. The Bridge Curse 2: The Extraction is Taiwan’s turn to haunt a place of learning (in this case, a university), and it’s…
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There is massive money on the table for the first localisation outfit that can produce high-quality translations of Chinese-developed games for their Western release. Unfortunately, we don’t have that localisation infrastructure yet. It has only been in the last decade or so that games from Taiwan and/or China have started…
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One of my favourite things about Broken Roads is that every second sentence there’s a word that’s highlighted, and you can press a button to see a little pop-up explaining what that word means. That word is inevitably a piece of Australian English, and the developers felt the need to…
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World War 2 continues to be one of the most in-demand theatres of war for strategy and/or tactical games. That makes sense for many reasons: The battles themselves and the tactics that were on display lend themselves to video game mechanics in ways that other wars at around the same…
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There is an inherent contradiction at the heart of Dicefolk. It’s not a bad contradiction by any means, but it is one that, at first, gives the game an odd and offbeat vibe that’s difficult to get along with. As you plug along from there, however, Dicefolk’s charms start to…
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