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.
This month’s free game haul for Xbox Live subscribers is a pretty solid one. This month sees the usual drop of four free titles, ranging from strategy to indies, family games and retro gems. So here’s what you get: Xbox One: Prison Architect — available Sept. 1 to 30 Livelock — available Sept. 16 to…
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Multiplayer is something that, over the years, has moved further and further into the online-only space. All but gone are the days of friends or family paying with (or against) one another on a single console. The days of couch party titles like Mario Kart 64 and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 are gone, replaced…
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The games that make the biggest splash at E3 are the ones that debut a big, bombastic trailer to the public. What was remarkable about CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 was that it didn’t do any of that, and still became the talk of the show. The game didn’t even have a trailer that was…
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Untitled Goose Game, the goose vs farmer trolling simulator from Melbourne developer House House, captured the internet’s imagination last year with its hilarious debut trailer. The biggest question that trailer failed to answer was “When can I play this, and why isn’t the answer ‘right now’?” The answer might be sooner than you think. House…
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I’ve brought this up before but it bears repeating: while it’s easy to think of sports sims as lazy annual rehashes, upgrading or altering a few aspects of a game to justify their existence, the truth is that that’s rarely the case. Madden NFL 18 strode boldly into new territory, finally making the jump to…
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I’ve never hesitated to recommend Sennheiser headphones to friends in the past. Their headphones have been a go-to of mine for a very long time. My years-long love affair with their HD 598 model is well documented. So when the opportunity to try out a pair of headphones from their gaming range arrived, I leapt…
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It’s hard for me to believe I used to be really good at Super Smash Bros. And not merely good when compared to the group of friends I played with — I wasn’t even the best among them. I understand now why people didn’t want to fight any of us after more than a round…
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Call of Duty is a franchise you either love or hate, there doesn’t seem to be much in between. There are a few reasons for this. It’s home to one of the most aggressive, toxic communities in gaming. It found its niche as a multiplayer twitch shooter years ago and hasn’t felt much need to…
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No-one is more surprised by that headline than me. When we reviewed No Man’s Sky at launch back in 2016, our reviewer took an especially dim view of the game’s failure to implement a litany of the mechanics it had promised. They were not the only person who felt this way. We all remember what…
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In a year already packed with huge gaming releases, Red Dead Redemption 2 is set to dwarf them all. The sequel to Rockstar‘s 2010 open world western launches in late October and, with only three months remaining, our first real look at the game in action is right around the corner. Tonight, in fact.
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Yesterday, Rockstar Games announced that a gameplay trailer for their forthcoming open-world western Red Dead Redemption 2 would arrive overnight. Arrive it did, and goodness, what a trailer it is.
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If there’s a creed in the mobile phone industry, it’s likely “Make it look like an iPhone, but then do everything you can to make it cheaper.” This is the strategy Chinese maker Oppo have clung to for a while now and with the R15 Pro, they are steering into the curve harder than ever.
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Look, I reviewed Sonic Mania when it launched last year. I found it to be a breath of fresh air in a series comprehensively and aggressively starved of it for decades. It was the kind of modern update that walks an incredibly fine line, paying homage to what came before and pushing the property forward…
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Look, I reviewed Sonic Mania when it launched last year. I found it to be a breath of fresh air in a series comprehensively and aggressively starved of it for decades. It was the kind of modern update that walks an incredibly fine line, paying homage to what came before and pushing the property forward…
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The Plantronics RIG 500 Pro Esport Gaming Headphones, the latest refresh of Plantronics’ longrunning RIG 500 line, are about as close to the perfect gaming headset as any I’ve ever used. I would like to preface this review with a sole caveat: while the headset I was given by Plantronics with which to conduct this…
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What do you need in a good gaming mouse? Like, really need? You need it to be comfortable. You need its action to be smooth and precise. You need it to have the requisite buttons for basic play, and maybe one or two extra for customisation and macros. When it comes to designing gaming mice,…
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What do you need in a good gaming mouse? Like, really need? You need it to be comfortable. You need its action to be smooth and precise. You need it to have the requisite buttons for basic play, and maybe one or two extra for customisation and macros. When it comes to designing gaming mice,…
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Hand of Fate 2, the card-based role-player by Brisbane-based Defiant Development, launched on major platforms last year. Its Nintendo Switch port took a little longer to arrive, but arrive it has and, for Switch owners, it was worth the wait.
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The Logitech G512 Carbon Mechanical Keyboard is very well mannered. It has the rapid fire response times you’re looking for in a gaming keyboard, but the click from its switches as you type is minimal. This makes it a board that can do it all — you can use this as a day-to-day office board…
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It’s a bit weird reviewing a pair of PC speakers in 2018. A casual poll of friends who use desktop PC’s for work, gaming or both revealed that every last one of them use headphones, for a variety of reasons. Some of them have infants they don’t want to wake up. Some of them are…
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Playdead’s Inside follows rather closely in the footsteps of Limbo, the developer’s debut title. Though it revisits many of the mechanics that made Limbo so interesting, Inside has a purpose and a story to tell that is as different to its predecessor as its possible to be. On the Switch, that story can now be experienced…
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The ICBC (Asia) e-Sports & Music Festival Hong Kong is kicking off in August and bringing three major international esports tournaments featuring top teir teams and players across CS:GO, PUBG and League of Legends.
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I can’t believe that eight years after its release, Limbo still holds up as well as it does. Ported to the Nintendo Switch alongside its Playdead stablemate Inside, the game makes the system its home with ease. Given its straightforward mechanics and stripped back, atmospheric presentation, this does not come as a surprise.
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Fans of Uncharted, Naughty Dog’s long-running series of Indiana Jones-esque action adventure games, have been demanding a feature film adaptation for many years. For a large number of those fans, the hope was always that Firefly and Castle actor Nathan Fillion would play the game’s hero, Nathan Drake, when the time came. A slickly produced fan film,…
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I have a rule when it comes to playing games for review: Remain objective, even when the game is in a genre you aren’t crazy about. Last week, I broke that rule. I had assumed I would detest Octopath Traveler. I had resigned myself to reviewing yet another JRPG, despite my long and well-documented history…
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There is a pervasive assumption among PC gaming hobbyists that wireless accessories like mice are going to be a problem. That corded solutions are always the way to go. For a long time, this rather conventional wisdom was correct, but its getting harder and harder for it to stand up under scrutiny. Devices like Logitech’s…
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Ubisoft returns to Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle, the surprise strategy hit of 2017, with a lengthy new slab of DLC with Donkey Kong in the spotlight. To call Donkey Kong Adventure an “expansion” in the strictest sense might be to oversell it. It doesn’t really add much to the game that wasn’t there already….
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The HyperX Cloud Stinger Core shouldn’t sound as good as it does. This is a $70 AUD pair of headphones. You expect certain things from $70 headphones. You expect them to be cheap. You expect them to be made from hard, unyeilding plastic that keeps them from being worn comfortably for long periods. You certainly…
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Younger audiences don’t give a shit about television. They watch Netflix, they watch YouTube and, in greater numbers than ever, they’re watching Twitch. This means that Twitch has become an attractive platform for streamers of all stripes to get their start. Elgato’s HD60 S is, for the first-time streamer, exactly the kind of kit you…
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There is a trend in modern AAA game design of pinching the best ideas from other games and building on them to create something new. Hi-Rez Studios is a developer that has built a successful portfolio by doing exactly this. They are very good at looking at successful multiplayer games, distilling their most enjoyable components…
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