Ōkami has been one of Capcom’s most beloved games since it first released more than a decade ago, and it’s easy to see why: a beautiful art style, rich story, and Zelda-inspired gameplay all combine to create one of the most captivating games of the PlayStation 2 era. Strangely enough, …
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I’m one of the few people in the world who wasn’t taken with Horizon Zero Dawn. It’s an incredible technical achievement and a game with a fascinating premise, but for me, none of the story, characters, or game systems really lived up to that potential. I’d hoped that a big …
I wasn’t a big fan of Nights of Azure when it first came out. I liked some of the ideas behind it, and the art direction and character designs are fantastic, but I felt that clunky gameplay and poor storytelling held it back. In the years since, I’ve come to …
There’s been a lot of attention on substandard localisation work for Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana, to the point that NIS America president Takuro Yamashita apologised for it and promised sweeping improvements. All that criticism was well-founded, but it also drowned out another really important detail: Ys VIII is a …
The Western debut of Zwei: The Ilvard Insurrection is one of the most delightful surprises of the year. It’s a localisation of Zwei II, one of Nihon Falcom’s lesser-known titles and a game that, having originally released in Japan in 2008, is almost a decade old. I can’t imagine there …
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, …
Matterfall is the latest example of Housemarque’s mastery of twin-stick shooters, this time combined with platformer mechanics – and it works wonders. Housemarque has earned a reputation as one of the finest developers of twin-stick shooters, and rightfully so. They’ve got this classic genre down to a fine art, making …
Over the years, Koei Tecmo’s Warriors series has made a name for itself as one of the foremost efforts to gamify history. Dynasty Warriors took inspiration from Romance of the Three Kingdoms – one of the most significant pieces of historical literature the world has ever known – and forged …
If you want to make your indie pixel art platformer stand out, you might give it some ridiculous premise: a cat-owned company’s teleporters keep breaking down, so it’s up to a the firm’s master of Custodial Sciences (who is a frog) to investigate. You might do something even more radical, …
Nioh wears its Dark Souls inspiration on its sleeve, but it builds on that with deeper combat and captivating story of Sengoku-era Japan. It’s hard to talk about Nioh without making comparisons to Dark Souls. Team Ninja’s latest outing wears its influences on its sleeve: methodical combat built around a …