Grappling: good. Dogs: good. Combine them and you get Grapple Dog, a fun platformer with plenty of ideas and a whole lot of charm. Grappling hooks. Is there anything better than a good grappling hook? You throw it at a ceiling then fling yourself across a gap, feeling the rush …
Monster Hunter games have always been for a very particular audience. While the marketing behind the franchise’s more contemporary releases would have you believe that accessibility has been a key focus for developer Capcom, the reality of the final products often couldn’t be further from those claims. 2021’s Monster Hunter …
Few games establish a sense of flow quite like OlliOlli. The combination gnarly skate tricks, wild combos, high-speed traversal, and platformer level design—Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater by way of Rayman Origins, if you want to get reductive—is a rush that only ramps up as you master its intricacies. This is …
A new trailer for Touken Ranbu Warriors dropped overnight, and alongside an overview of game systems and introduction of a mysterious new character, there’s a preview of a beautiful opening theme by Akiko Shikata. Prolific as she is in the videogame music scene, Shikata’s layered vocals and evocative compositions will …
Ghostrunner’s blend of free-running and action is refreshing because the latter is incorporated into the former. It’s a platformer first and foremost but the action itself remains exciting due to two reasons: most enemies die from a slash of your sword and ALL enemies kill you in one hit. By …
Before going into detailed thoughts about my experience, allow me to get this out of the way: Death Stranding: Director’s Cut looks stunning on the PlayStation 5. Admittedly, this isn’t a feature exclusive to the PS5 as even on weaker machines like the base PS4, the game’s terrain, models and …
I write a lot about game preservation when reviewing re-releases, remasters, and the like. I’d say that’s arguably more important than the nostalgia or simple entertainment value—in an industry that’s so bad at preserving its own history, these kinds of releases are one of the better options we have for …
I don’t envy anyone tasked with making a new Metroid game in 2021. Reviving a series that’s so fiercely beloved comes with a heavy burden of expectations that often contradict: to recapture everything that we loved about those classics 20 years ago, but also to carry the series forward into …
You could be forgiven for never having heard of Xuan Yuan Sword, given that, until now, it’s had almost no international presence—a couple of poorly-translated multilingual Steam releases and Asia-region versions with English language support being the full extent. But this is a series with a long and storied history …
There’s nothing quite like El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron. Sure, a stylish action game that goes heavy on the religious imagery makes the likes of Devil May Cry and Bayonetta an obvious point of reference—indeed, director Sawaki Takeyasu worked on the original Devil May Cry as a character designer—but …
