I’m not sure how to feel about this trend of porting mobile games to home consoles. I love mobile games, don’t get me wrong—this isn’t some sort of tired “mobile games aren’t real games” nonsense—but mobile is a very different environment with very different strengths. Most phone games tend to …
“Avast me hearties, prepare to let loose the cannons!” It’s been a few years since the Johnny Depp made pirates “cool” again, which means it’s about time for a mainstream revival. Sea of Thieves first popped up on my radar after a bunch of Twitch streamers began playing it, and …
PlayLink is a neat concept: PS4 party games that let people use their phones to play, eliminating the need to wrangle controllers and reducing a barrier to participation who don’t spend much time playing console games. With a bunch of different developers involved, the framework offers up a range of …
Last year’s release of Zwei: The Ilvard Insurrection was a lovely surprise: the first Western release of a niche, decade-old game that’s aged surprisingly well. That was actually the second game in the Zwei series, so it makes sense that XSEED would want to localise the first one as well. …
0°N 0°W (pronounced “zero north, zero west”) is a tricky game to describe. It doesn’t follow traditional game design structures at all; if you had to group it within a genre, “walking simulator” would probably be the closest you could get, but even that doesn’t really capture the essence of …
Few games carry the legacy that Space Invaders does. It’s easily one of the most influential games ever made, being almost single-handedly responsible for the shoot ’em up genre and arcade leaderboards. Almost anyone who was alive in the golden era of arcade games will have some memory of playing …
Damsel, from Australian indie outfit Screwtape Studios, is a simple game in concept: playing as the eponymous Damsel (who is anything but in distress), you run around short, sharp platformer levels shooting vampires with your trusty shotgun. That’s pretty much the entirety of the game, but it works wonders; Damsel …
Monster Hunter has always been a tricky series to get into. The idea at the heart of it is simple—hunt monsters, collect materials from their corpses, and craft that into stronger equipment that lets you hunt stronger monsters—but the wealth of different systems underscoring that was always difficult to wrap …
Tokyo RPG Factory’s 2016 debut, I Am Setsuna, was a masterpiece. More than simply a throwback to the JRPGs of the ’90s, it was a deep exploration of the very concept of nostalgia, and the weird cocktail of emotions that comes with it. That didn’t stop it from being …
Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood‘s regular content updates are now well underway, with patch 4.2: Rise of a New Sun marking the second major update since Stormblood‘s launch last year. If you’ve been playing the game at all since its 2014 relaunch, you surely know what to expect from each new …
