My favourite Serious Sam title to date is the PlayStation 2/GameCube spinoff, Next Encounter. As much as I enjoy Croteam’s work with the series proper, Climax Solent’s take on the formula had a better rhythm and energy to the action. Or it might have just been that it was my first Serious Sam, so I immediately latched on to it…
The Blood of Dawnwalker is the latest proof that Polish RPGs should now be seen as a genre in their own right, like JRPGs are. There’s a distinct approach to the genre that comes out of studios like CD Projekt Red, Questline, Reality Pump and now Rebel Wolves, that have…
Star Wars Zero Company is an excellent tactics game in the XCOM…
Look, the Nippon Professional Baseball league – the NPB – is just…
There is a moment in the original Final Fantasy VII where, after hours of scrapping around an ugly, horrible city, the party breaks out into the wider world, and it’s one of the defining moments of the game. Suddenly, an adventure that seemed narrow in scope became huge and expansive:…
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Don’t Nod has, traditionally, done storytelling well, but struggled to pair it up with gameplay that people could love. Life Is Strange was the breakout title for the company, and it worked well enough because it was a point-and-click adventure that wasn’t testing the player’s button-pressing skills, but Vampyr, on…
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Granblue Fantasy turns ten this year – yes, time really does fly – and it is one of the all-time most successful mobile games. It has soared to over 25 million downloads in its home country alone – and that means about one in five Japanese people have played this…
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Persona 3 occupies an interesting role within the broader Persona series. Unlike Personas 4 and 5, there is less of an emphasis on the “J-Pop” bubbly quality that significantly lightened the mood of those two titles (however serious the underlying message of each was). Unlike Persona 1 and 2, Persona…
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Every time it seems like the extended Yakuza franchise might be pushing its luck just a little too far, the development team at Ryu ga Gotoku find some way of reminding us all why it’s such a fine series. Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth shouldn’t have worked. Pulling Kazuma Kiryu…
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It was deeply funny to me to load up Tekken 8 and see that the big philosophical theme around this game is “aggression.” A fighting game promising a new “aggressive combat system,” is surely redundant, I thought to myself, since what is any fighting game if it is not “aggressive?”…
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I’m going to be very lazy with this review of The Last Of Us Part 2 Remastered, and copy/paste most of my original review of The Last Of Us 2. I’m doing this for three reasons: It was the easy decision for Sony to “remaster” a game that is already…
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To this day, one of my favourite RTS titles is The Lord of the Rings: War of the Ring. With that game (and its sequel) EA (yes, EA!) achieved something truly special: a streamlined, authentic RTS that perfectly captured the aesthetics and drama of the source material, and allowed you…
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Surfing is a messy sport, and not just because you’ll get sand in places where the sun doesn’t shine. Where most sports are defined by the nice, neat rules that humans set down and agree to compete together under, the defining characteristic of surfing is that it’s a battle with…
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Persona 5 Tactica takes far too long to get to the point. However, once it gets there it shows itself to be a far more brilliant addition to the overall Persona 5 collection than many will give it credit for. At first, it seems like it’ll be irreverent fan service,…
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