Going into Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown, I never expected a story with any sort of substance. Granted, I’ve never played an Ace Combat game before, but what I’ve come to expect of military-themed action games is vapid nonsense at best and aggressive imperialist propaganda—almost always in celebration of the …
At a little over six years since its original Wii U release, New Super Mario Bros. U isn’t that old. But to play it fresh in 2019, it feels like a relic from a time long gone—both for better and worse. On some level, this is to be expected. While …
Kingdom Hearts III is mere weeks away now, and that means a lot of people are very, very excited. For people who’ve played all eight previous games (that’s right, the game called Kingdom Hearts III is the ninth game in the series), they’ll finally get a conclusion to this grand, 16-year-long, console-spanning saga. For …
The quick elevator pitch for London Detective Mysteria would be to say that it’s a combination of detective fiction and romance, with analogues for a handful of famed literary detectives as your potential love interests. As intriguing as “cute detective boys” sounds in its own right, the magic here runs …
You can always count on certain things with an otome game from Otomate: stunning artwork, excellent writing, cute boys, and a tragic undercurrent to the romance that defines the genre. Oftentimes, Otomate will also use that framework for some sort of big-picture philosophical exploration: Collar x Malice is as much …
We’re a few days into January now, which means 2018 is a thing of the past. It saw a seemingly endless string of game releases—I played and reviewed well over 100 new games myself, and even that seemed to barely scratch the surface. (I also finally picked up a Switch …
You know you’ve got a problem when the VR aspect of a VR game actively works against everything it’s trying to achieve. You know you’ve really got a problem when that’s the least of a game’s troubles. Cue the disaster that is Gungrave VR. I got a hint of what …
I’m a latecomer to the Atelier series. I played dabbled briefly with Atelier Iris 3 back in the day, but it wasn’t until a couple of years ago with Atelier Firis that I really got into Gust’s heartwarming JRPGs. From that perspective, going back to Atelier Rorona—which first came out …
Until recently, I’d taken it as a given that a 4X strategy game‘Explore, expand, exploit, exterminate’ – a genre of strategy game that puts focus on things like economy, technology, and diplomacy as well as military might would be nigh impossible to make work on any console, let alone with …
Originally released for PC in 2014, Astebreed is an attempt a more cinematic take on the scrolling shoot ’em up. That doesn’t necessarily mean more narrative-focused, but in lieu of the genre’s usual static side-on or top-down camera, Astebreed dances between different perspectives and employs camera cuts in a way …