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…
Final Fantasy XVI is a spectacular blockbuster that is also so much more than a simple “AAA-game”. Where most blockbusters aim to manipulate the player’s emotions but have little ambition beyond that, Final Fantasy XVI dares to challenge players with a narrative of depth and poignancy. It is the rarest…
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Ever since I first laid eyes on Bullfrog’s classic Theme Park, I’ve been equally smitten by theme park simulators and also terrified of what they make me do. Don’t get me wrong; the classic blend of management simulation – like it or not, you’re more or less balancing an Excel…
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So in a game titled “Company of Heroes 3” you get to play as the Germans (the, uh, World War 2 Germans) in one of the game’s campaigns. That is… certainly a brave decision. If the story was in any way effective, this would have been an enormously controversial game.…
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It’s unclear to me what audience LEGO 2K Drive is intended for. It’s very capable at what it does, but it also seems to be an effort to shove a whole lot of best practice big game stuff into a package, and in doing so comes across as a little…
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Since AFL 23 launched a week ago, patches have been released nearly every day. The game was released in a poor state (note: as I noted in that article, I have in the past worked with Big Ant, the developer of the game, though I have not had any association…
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I haven’t played an Anno game since Anno: Create A New World on the Wii and DS, but I absolutely loved those games, and I likewise love Anno 1800, the first game in the main series to also get a console release (the Wii and DS titles were spinoffs). If…
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Annual sports game refreshes all tend to get a little stale over time, but few have had such a fall from grace as we saw out of 2K Games’ WWE line of games back with WWE2K20. The shift from Japanese developer, Yukes, to US Studio, Visual Concepts, led to one…
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We don’t hear as much about the Eastern Front during World War 2. This is, of course, largely because the heroes of the piece were Soviets. Anything that could be perceived as lionising the heroics of Soviets doesn’t play well with the West’s official propaganda line on what happened during…
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Catan’s trajectory has been incredible, given that it’s only 28 years old. Initially, it was something of a disruptor, helping the “Eurogame” become a dominant approach to board games. From there it became a Monopoly-like thing – a game that absolutely everyone owns a copy of and is aware of…
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There are three things I look forward to in a Yakuza game: Exceptional writing and storytelling, a vibrant and interesting open world (rare, given how dull and bloated most open worlds are), and an authentic setting that makes me homesick for Japan. Like A Dragon: Ishin! might not have “Yakuza”…
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