We need more Māori stories in the mainstream. We need more Māori films, Māori video games, Māori books, Māori comics, Māori TV shows. There’s so much untapped potential in Māori history, culture, and folklore for stories across all media and spanning all sorts of genres, and The Dead Lands is …
LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens is the best LEGO game to date. Aside from using the best Star Wars film (yes, I went there) as its source material, it’s managed to breath new life into the LEGO game formula. The combination of action, adventure, LEGO-based puzzles, and oodles of …
The tactical RPG genre is one that is, for the most part, fairly rigid. That’s no bad thing, of course, but it means I thought I knew what to expect from Grand Kingdom going in. I did not. This is a game that’s taken a well-established genre and turned it …
Pokemon Go is now available, and aside from the sorts of server issues that are nigh-unavoidable for the launch of a hyped-up network-dependant game like this, it’s fantastic. My expectations were high, but they’ve been met—exceeded, even. It’s admittedly bare-bones right now in terms of feature set, but the core …
I Am Setsuna is the latest in a long line of Japanese games that have been butchered in the name of “localisation” to appease the delicate sensibilities of the Western audience. Nintendo had the gall to inject Western-centric humour into Fire Emblem Fates, a game that otherwise has absolutely no …
Disclosure: I previously worked with eastasiasoft in a freelance capacity on Rainbow Moon. I have had no involvement in the development of Lost Sea. Lost Sea is the sort of game that reminds me why I don’t really like roguelikes all that much – because of both what it does well …
Last month, Warner Bros. and TT Games announced Year 2 expansion plans for LEGO Dimensions, with another 16 franchises due to join the game: The A-Team, Adventure Time, Beetlejuice, ET, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Ghostbusters (2016), The Goonies, Gremlins, Harry Potter, Knight Rider, The LEGO Batman Movie, LEGO City Undercover, Mission: …
As much as I love Samurai Shodown, the premier samurai-themed fighting game, to me, has always been The Last Blade 2. When it first caught my attention back in the early 2000s, it was the Bakumatsu setting that really grabbed me. It’s a period of history that I was fascinated …
The Kickstarter demo for Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night couldn’t have come at a better time. The crowdfunding model has been brought into doubt this week with the critical panning of Mighty No. 9, another Kickstarter darling that promised a spiritual successor to Mega Man but, by almost all accounts, fell far short – not to mention the …
With the indie scene’s obsession with “retro-inspired” games, we’re seeing a lot of throwbacks to the 8-bit era. Some, like Shovel Knight, commit fully to the idea; for others, it’s a vague reference to a pixelated art style. But one things remains constant: “retro” and “8-bit” seem to be almost …
