I used to be one of those people who wrote off the Musou series as “boring” and “repetitive”; a mindless button masher with little going for it beyond the brief satisfaction of swatting enemy grunts away like flies. I’ve come to appreciate the series a lot more in recent years, though, …
The original Bullet Soul was a game with some neat ideas, but it didn’t execute on them as well as it could have. It was a typical bullet hell shooter in a lot of ways, but it emphasised the negation of enemy bullets as much as it did evasion and …
Harley Quinn is one of the best and most interesting characters to come out of Batman’s gallery of villains. Since her first appearance in Batman: The Animated Series, she’s appeared in comics with regularity, and she’s headlined a few books of her own. Once a villain, The New 52 and …
In a world where Netflix and Spotify dominate the television and music markets, it’s only a matter of time before the subscription approach becomes commonplace for games as well. There are a handful of services out there already, but between the technical hurdles that games present and the misty details …
I have fond memories of playing NES Golf as a kid. I knew nothing about golf and never had an interest in the real-life sport, but there was something about the way that game boiled all the complexities of golf down to simple, intuitive game systems that just hooked me. …
Mary Skelter: Nightmares is one of my favourite dungeon crawlers in a long time. Granted, I don’t play a huge number of them and I may have missed some other gems over the years, but I can’t think of any other dungeon crawler that’s captivated me as much as Mary …
I don’t understand the hate that Knack got when it launched alongside the PlayStation 4 a few years ago. It wasn’t an amazing game by any means, and it could get repetitive, but it was a fun, competent action adventure romp with a few neat ideas that it executed well. …
The isometric stealth tactics genre has been dormant for a long time, and this is understandable. It’s niche, to say the least – there are only a handful of notable examples, even from the genre’s heyday of the early 2000s. Such games are also tricky to design well; to take …
A couple of years ago, PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita owners got introduced to The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel, one of the best JRPGs in years. Sadly, the Western release came in the waning years of both those platforms, so it didn’t make as much of a …
Rabi-Ribi cleverly combines the Metroidvania and bullet hell genres, using a silly but heartfelt story and adorable pixel art to seal the deal. Two of the very finest game genres are Metroidvanias and bullet hell shoot ‘em ups. (This is a fact. Don’t @ me.) When you take two of …
