David Smith is the former games and technology editor at The AU Review. He has previously written for PC World Australia. You can find him on Twitter at @RhunWords.
It might be fair to call Days Gone the PS4 exclusive most of us kind of forgot about. PlayStation’s stellar year of exclusives in 2018, coupled with the decision to skip the end-of-year PlayStation Experience event, meant going a long while between trailers and announcements. It dropped off the radar a bit. But with the…
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Ukrainian developer 4A Games have spent the last decade doggedly chasing the perfect adaptation of Metro, Dmitri Glukhovsky’s series of post-apocalyptic science fiction novels. In Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light, 4A gave it everything they had, attempting to execute on their vision with the tools and funding at their disposal. They met with differing degrees of success but…
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Since its announcement at The Game Awards late last year, fans have been waiting for a look at Mortal Kombat 11 in action. This morning’s reveal livestream dropped a raft of new trailers for the NetherRealm Studios fighter, all focused on gameplay and characters. Following on from 2015’s Mortal Kombat X, MK11 introduces a time travel…
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When we think about game design that could be considered “timeless,” the classic Super Mario Bros formula still leaps readily to mind. 34 years after its first appearance on the NES, Shigeru Miyamoto’s original push-forward platformer design remains as compelling as its ever been. New Super Mario Bros U Deluxe only proves this further, taking…
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In mid-November 2018, popular Overwatch streamer and former pro player Brandon “Seagull” Larned posted a video to his YouTube channel titled The State of Overwatch. In it, Seagull breaks down a number of criticisms of Overwatch as a game at present. He takes issue with the state of the game’s ongoing GOATS Composition meta and the abundance…
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I like the HyperX Alloy FPS range of mechanical keyboards, that much is fairly Well Documented by now. It’s also getting harder to review them because, to be perfectly honest, there isn’t exactly a ton of variation model-to-model. Part of this is that HyperX already make a bloody solid board. It isn’t broke, so there…
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Margaret Court Arena will play host to a massive Fortnite tournament for the second time in the space of six months. The Australian Open, the nation’s biggest and popular tennis event, is running on a pair of tournaments, the combined prize pool of which comes to $500,000. The first 500 players to register on the…
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Choosing your favourite game of the year is hard. We’ve done it every year since we founded The AU Review’s games section in 2014, and it never gets any easier. In 2018, we played so many incredible games that it became impossible to list and number every last one of them, so we opted not…
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It’s almost 2019, and that means a whole new year of free games for Xbox Live Gold subscribers. With December’s Games With Gold lineup finally winding down, January’s selection have been announced and they are very bloody good indeed. The month’s selections are four games, divided as always into two Xbox One titles and two…
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With Super Smash Bros Ultimate scratching that fighting game itch pretty well at the moment, you might be on the hunt for some fresh challengers. Good news — this weekend’s CouchWarriors Crossup is not only debuting its brand new Smash Ultimate competition, it’s also a significant stop on the Dragon Ball FighterZ World Cup qualifier…
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PlayStation Australia know that being a gamer in the summer is a bit rubbish. You have to have the windows open so its hard to see the TV during the day, which is no good. If you want to close the place up to create a little darkness, it means running the aircon while you…
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The AU Review has partnered with our friends at Alienware Australia to give away three double passes to the Gfinity Elite Series Finals this weekend! All the finals action will go down at the Gfinity esports arena at Sydney’s Hoyts Entertainment Quarter on Saturday, December 15 and Sunday, December 16. Be there live as Sydney…
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id Software’s Doom, the progenitor of the first person shooter genre as we know it, turns 25 today. A game that was so uniquely itself that the term First Person Shooter was invented so we could stop called them “Doom clones,” Doom is an indelible component in the gaming landscape. To commemorate the 25 year…
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It’s been 20 years since Masahiro Sakurai became the architect of one of the riskiest experiments in Nintendo’s history. Super Smash Bros‘ dramatic origin story is well known — Sakurai had an idea for a four-player fighting game featuring Nintendo characters. Sakurai was acutely aware that getting Nintendo to approve a game about their beloved…
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Only two years ago, I reviewed Just Cause 3 for what was then the AU’s film and TV masthead, The Iris. In writing that review, I learned an important lesson about the link between taking your time and offering responsible critique. What a great opportunity to reaffirm that lesson, I thought when our review copy…
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Civilization VI was already complicated game long before the decision was made to port it to console. A great game to be sure, but a very complicated one. Civ has long made its home on the PC. The game’s overall complexity and forest of nested menus made a jump to console seem all but impossible….
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Battlefield V is goddamned pretty. It’s something I’ve continually murmured to myself while reviewing DICE’s latest entry in their longrunning shooter franchise. Nobody is capable of squeezing the visual juice out of EA’s Frostbite engine quite as well as they can. The game they have constructed with it isn’t just one of the best Battlefield…
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Sony’s WH-1000XM2 wireless headphones are some of my all-time favourites. The perfect storm of comfort and great sound that I look for in any pair of headphones I own, they have become a constant companion on my daily commute. This is why, when a pair of Sony’s new WH-1000XM3 wireless headphones arrived on my doorstep,…
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The biggest fear I had following Bethesda’s announcement of Fallout 76 was that the move to an online would blow up in their faces. Adding real people to the equation has always been one of fastest ways to ruin any gaming experience. But, from time to time, it’s also the best way to create unique,…
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When your company, a video game developer known for a very niche, though long-running series, is cut loose from its home at a well-known publisher, there is good reason to believe you’ll never make a game again. This was the nightmare scenario that played out for Hitman developer IO interactive when Square-Enix decided to remove…
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Eleven years after their debut album A Guide To Love, Loss & Desperation, The Wombats continue to be a force to be reckoned with in Australia. Daniel Hanssen was at their recent return to Melbourne to capture them with Eves Karydas.
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Tetris Effect is extremely good and you should play it. I’m not burying the lede on this one. Tetris Effect is one of the best and most inventive entries the long-running puzzle series has seen in years, and if you are in any way interested in Tetris then you need to pick this up. Tetris…
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Armello, the fantasy-steeped digital board game by Melbourne studio League of Geeks is very, very good. We’ve known this for a while. The game is available on almost every platfom there is and if you haven’t availed yourself of its strategic, card-based suspense and dice-roll intrigue since its launch 2015 then you really should. Conveniently,…
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Over the last month or so I’ve been roadtesting two of Razer’s top tier PC gaming accessories. The Razer Mamba Wireless gaming mouse and the Goliathus Extended Chroma soft mouse mat. Together, they provide the kind of aesthetic that most Twitch streamers fall over themselves for — the cool, industrial black suffused with customisable LED…
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Feeling old yet? Everybody’s favourite purple dragon Spyro turns 20 today, and to celebrate his birthday – and the release of the highly anticipated Spyro Reignited Trilogy, baking sensations Raymond Tan and Vickie Liu have teamed up for a one-of-a-kind Spyro cake. Baked with cassis grape swiss meringue buttercream, chocolate shards and delicate isomalt sugar…
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I don’t exactly know how one reviews a piece of media as expansive as Red Dead Redemption 2. To call it a game is the correct descriptor, but it also doesn’t feel like it quite encapsulates the enormity of what Rockstar have accomplished. Red Dead Redemption 2 is an open world Western set in the very…
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I told you. I bloody told you Warcraft III was coming back. During their keynote address at BlizzCon 2018, Blizzard Entertainment’s classic games team took to the stage to talk about what they’d been working on since completing last year’s StarCraft Remastered. Warcraft III Reforged revives the classic RTS series that gave birth to an…
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Despite Blizzard’s clear warnings that fans should “temper their expectations” regarding any announcements made at BlizzCon this year, the internet has gone nuclear over Diablo Immortal, a fully fledged version of the popular ARPG for iOS and Android mobiles. The announcement came at the end of today’s BlizzCon keynote address/show-and-tell and it was hard not…
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And now, a take that may be controversial: Diablo 3 is way better on console than it is on PC. No seriously, hear me out on this one. While Diablo 3 has been available on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 for some time, this is the game’s first appearance on the Nintendo Switch or,…
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For those old enough to have played Resident Evil 2 the first time around (or perhaps later in one of its numerous ports), there will be a lot about Capcom’s ground-up remaster that will feel familiar. There will also be a lot that is wholly new. In updating a twenty year old game for a…
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