I’m actually surprised it took as long as it did for Kirby to go the 3D platformer route. While Mario’s been exploring (and consistently reinventing) 3D adventures since the N64 days, and even Donkey Kong dabbled a bit with Donkey Kong 64, Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards was still a …
The PS2 era was a wonderful time for 3D platformers. With the heightened power of a new console and those early teething issues largely resolved, the genre flourished: games like Jak and Daxter, Sly Cooper, and Ratchet and Clank opened the doors to colourful new worlds rife with things to …
There’s too much stock put into “polish” as a metric of quality in a videogame. The assumption is that “polish” is an inherently good thing: that an unpolished game can only ever be good in spite of its rough edges, and never because of them; that high production values and …
This morning, Sony and Insomniac shared a new trailer for the upcoming Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, putting the newest Lombax, Rivet, front and centre. Rivet’s been part of Rift Apart‘s marketing cycle since the game was first announced, but we haven’t had confirmation of her name until now. The …
Mark April 14 on your calendar, because this is when you’ll be able to play Tasomachi: Behind the Twilight, a gorgeous-looking 3D exploration platformer from Japanese industry veteran nocras and publisher Playism. Tasomachi sees you, as crash-landed explorer Yukumo, exploring a mysterious fantasy town inspired by East Asian art, culture, …
The original Super Mario 3D World was one of the most acclaimed games on Wii U, and with good reason. It’s easily one of the high points of the whole Mario series, drawing inspiration from both its 2D and 3D incarnations to create something wholly unique and wonderful to play. …
Glyph is one of the more unique approaches I’ve seen when it comes to 3D platformers. While it hits all the genre’s familiar notes—running and jumping between platforms, avoiding obstacles and collecting treasures—it’s got one little change that makes a big impact: you’re a ball, with the ball-like physics that …
It’s hard to imagine what the videogame landscape would look like without 3D Mario. Super Mario 64, especially, influenced the entire direction of 3D games, and the likes of Super Mario Sunshine and Super Mario Galaxy made big impacts of their own. Such historically significant games need to be preserved …
PlayStation 5 brings Sackboy, the burlap hero of Media Molecule’s LittleBigPlanet series, into a new dimension. In the hands of Sumo Digital, the studio behind LittleBigPlanet 3, Sackboy: A Big Adventure puts a 3D platformer spin on things, with all the colourful creativity of its precursors. It’s missing a little …
Like The Playroom and The Playroom VR before it, Astro’s Playroom exists, first and foremost, as a showcase of what a new piece of hardware can do. All three games come free with their respective systems (PlayStation 4, PlayStation VR, and PlayStation 5), with gameplay designed around showing off what …
