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Feature: Sad shooty wizards
Valorant is Riot's newfangled hybrid of CS:GO and Overwatch, where teams of five run around shooting very deadly weapons while deploying character-based abilities. It's very, very similar to CS:GO, right down to the round structure and individual weapons. If you've ever defused a bomb in Counter-Strike, there's a good chance you'll already be a crack shot here. It's basically the same, but with more mind…
Feature: A bridge not far enough
I'm so interested in how expectation affects our experience of games. Whether it's from over-ambitious promotional materials, peculiarly unhelpful reviews, or completely misreading the game's description before buying it, what we're hoping for before we start really colours how we receive the game. I was convinced that Poly Bridge 2 was a goofy physics puzzler, something somewhere between Totally Accurate Battle Simulator and Crayon Physics…
Feature: Behold the Shatterpillar
Nimbatus is about building spaceships. More accurately, it's about learning to build spaceships. And if we're being completely honest, it's a game about learning how not to build them. At its heart is one of the most flexible digital construction toys I've come across, which allows for enormous complexity despite a relatively unforgiving learning curve, and Nimbatus would be a worthy purchase if its freestyle…
Feature: No we didn't like it, but we tried to fight it
Stealth games tend to come in two flavours. Nowadays most are systemic playgrounds, in which players are presented with a range of options for how to deal with any given situation, and errors are forgiven after the few seconds it takes a guard to decide it was probably rats. A handful of others are more rigid, with only one correct way to play, and each…
Feature: Tough taters
Atomicrops is not your granpappy’s pixel art farming sim. It’s not a farming sim at all, really, but more a twin stick bullet-hell-and-tarnation with some very light nods to life-sim elements through upgrades. It’s also moreish, dizzyingly vibrant, and full of more squirming veggies than when you threw up that carrot cake your mum tried to make look like a regular birthday cake by dumping…
Feature: Trial by dire
I like some parts of Crucible, but the guns don't feel good. That's a deathblow to any hero shooter, even one that's been mashed into a MOBA, and I can't move past it. Great character design, sumptuous alien environments, and a handful of interesting ideas have all been squandered by the way firing hot lead feels like tossing soft mints. That's galling. More galling still…
Feature: Eaten mess
When I saw the footage of aquatic murder sim Maneater from E3 last year, I had two responses. The first was that it looked really thrilling to play. The second was that it had the potential to be obscenely stupid. I wrote all about this in my preview, and tbh it's worth a read before you carry on, so I don't need to repeat myself…
Feature: A worthy pick
I knew Minecraft Dungeons was going to be fun when I played a couple of hours of the beta build last month. I knew this because, well, it was fun. It was the kind of fun you can fathom within about twelve seconds of starting a game, and the kind you know will be dependable in its simplicity, even if it might not last forever.…
Feature: Third Street will never die
Getting remastered games feels like a bit of a monkey's paw at this point, doesn't it? The finger has curled, and we get remasters of all the old games we loved - but we have to play them a decade after their original release, and not as the person we were when we loved them. And I did really love Saints Row. It has this…
Feature: It's all academic anyway
It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that any veteran of BioWare who has been there in excess of a decade, must be in want of their own indie studio. Bad Blood Studios is one such independent venture, set up by a former BW art director named Hayden Duvall, and Old Gods Rising is its first game. It's a creepy (if not outright horrific) first-person mystery…
Feature: Power of the crowd
The Wonderful 101 is a breezy, demented action game in which you battle alien invaders as an army of vinyl superheroes who can merge and transform themselves into weapons. Think Pikmin, but Captain Olimar is played by the Green Lantern, and you're tossing around Avengers instead of seedlings. Or to put it more succinctly, a literal “combined arms warfare” game.
Feature: The hand you're dealt.
Language: it's a funny old game, innit? I don't mean the languages of different countries, either, I mean the different ways of communicating within that. From all the different regional names for this small but noble beast, to whatever your family calls the TV remote control (ours was "iffer-offer"), to the fact that UrbanDictionary is a thing that exists at all, it can be hard…
Feature: “And my pick!”
I have seven seconds to bypass twenty feet of sheer rock face to reach a subterranean escape pod before it propels itself back up through the planet’s surface, leaving my dwarven engineer trapped in a network of dark tunnels teeming with screeching alien insects. After a seeming eternity of desperate scrambling, I’ve made it to the cavern containing the escape pod, my heart sinking as…
Feature: A seafaring RPG that's a joy to play
As I sailed westward along a remote, equatorial coastline, I clocked an unfortunately major issue that was about to befall me: my food supplies were in dire shape, and there wasn’t a single port in view for my crewmates to fill their rumbling bellies at. So, I sailed into deep water until I was attacked by a horde of sea monsters, lambasted them with a…
Feature: Tasty jerky
"Games are a series of interesting decisions". That Sid Meier quote has been floating around for nearly a decade, and writing it out nowadays can seem pat. "Of course they are!", you might say, or possibly "of course they're not!". Personally, I find it a helpful way of thinking about why I enjoy most of the games I play. Generally speaking, the more interesting the…
Feature: Binner binner, chicken dinner
It's always been hard to accept the beat 'em up's idea of depth perception. Here's a genre that asks you to punch and kick on a single wafer-thin plane, before slowly readjusting your 2D sprite a few millimetres deeper into the screen, to make a tentative punch at a foe somehow just out of reach, as if everyone exists as a sort of juiced-up Paper…
Feature: Between two ferns
Predator – the furious boy who simply cannot get enough of spines – is up to his old tricks again in this, Predator: Hunting Grounds, a gory and asymmetrical multiplayer shooter from the creators of the equally gory and asymmetrical hide and seek simulator Friday the 13th: The Game. Four human soldiers embark on a mission to do a thing in a jungle, notionally unaware…
Feature: Flatbed head
I took my Chevy to the levee, but the levee wasn’t dry. That’s the problem all over Black River, actually: a recent flood has rendered the soil sodden enough to swallow a car whole. Days of rain have closed the north road out of an already-sleepy Michigan town with rockslides. Power lines are down, too - although that might have more to do with stubborn…
Feature: Top gear
I've been playing Gears Tactics with every spare moment of the last week. The second I'm done writing this, I'm going back for more. It's superb. In fact, it's good to the extent where, as risky as it is to say such a thing, I'd argue it sets the new gold standard for turn-based tactics.I say that as a lifelong XCOM (and X-COM) fan, too,…
Feature: Electric sheepdog
Cloudpunk could have been a lot of things, many of them disappointing. It could have taken itself far too seriously. It could have been far too lightweight or by-the-numbers. It could have been a miserably realistic sisyphean chore. If I wanted to be cruel, I'd say it could have been a lot more than it is, too. But that's not because I think it's not…
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