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.
Three years have passed since Square Enix abruptly cut ties with Hitman 3 developer IO Interactive. The good news is that there appears to have been some measure of reconciliation. Though IO is self-publishing Hitman 3 in many territories, Square Enix is the publishing partner for Hitman 3 in Oceania. Without getting into specifics, reconciliation…
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Yesterday brought a tease about an Indiana Jones game at Bethesda. Today we have a Star Wars game landing at Ubisoft. It would appear the new LucasFilm Games division is on a bit of a roll. Announced in an interview with Wired, an untitled, open-world Star Wars project is underway at Ubisoft Massive, creators of…
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It took the new LucasFilm Games division just 24 hours to announce a new Indiana Jones game. The still-untitled game has landed at Wolfenstein: The New Colossus developer MachineGames. Its parent company Bethesda, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Microsoft, shared a teaser video on its social media accounts. It then clarified that the game is still in…
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The PlayStation 5 is the direct successor to the most successful video game console of all time. Success has been Sony’s watchword for the past seven years as its popular PlayStation 4 smashed industry records. It seemed that the system could do no wrong. A library of smash-hit first-party titles. A design that still feels…
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The HyperX Cloud Stinger Core Wireless has one of the longer names of any headphones I’ve ever reviewed. It’s also one of the most well-appointed, no-fuss, next-gen ready gaming headsets on the market right now. HyperX is a PC peripheral maker that likes to keep things simple. It prefers clean designs, good build quality, and…
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Immortals Fenyx RIsing learned a lot from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. This is not to say it should be compared to BotW — those comparisons don’t go very far and would be unfair at best. Immortals uses BotW’s mechanical trappings as a platform to say something else. It isn’t interested in a…
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Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is a game that feels like it’s a little at war with itself. The intersection of its warring Viking heroes and its lineage as a stealth-centric action title are at odds with each other. While it works hard to bridge that philosophical divide, this dissonance suffuses the entire game and ultimately weakens…
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For the last seven years, the Xbox One has been one of the internet’s favourite punching bags. The machine that Xbox debuted at Microsoft’s Redmond campus ahead of E3 2013 was suffering an identity crisis. It was a video game console that focused on everything BUT video games. Against a resurgent and clear-minded PlayStation, the…
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The pain of being publicly humbled suffuses every part of the Xbox Series X. Its predecessor’s missteps inform every facet of its design, from its outer shell to the operating system that powers it. After seven long years of being trampled by the competition, Xbox is finally getting up off the mat. It has taken…
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Watch Dogs Legion feels like the game the series has been striving to become since its inception. It’s a game with some of the biggest, boldest ideas to come out of Ubisoft in years. It is also a game that has clearly had to make some concessions in order to execute on these ideas. Merry…
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Netflix has announced a new live action original series based on Assassin’s Creed. It will work with game publisher Ubisoft to create AC shows across live action, animation, and anime, Deadline reports. Executive producers Jason Altman and Danielle Krenik from Ubisoft Film & Television currently oversee the project. It is on the hunt for a…
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Cyberpunk 2077 has been delayed. Again. Its release date moves from November 19 to December 10. According to developer CD Projekt Red, the reason for the delay has to do with quality assurance. Currently, as many as nine internal builds of Cyberpunk 2077 require testing for compatibility and optimisation. This is a lot of work,…
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Immortals: Fenyx Rising is Ubisoft’s first original AAA IP in god only knows how long. Ubi has a built a reputation as a publisher that likes a safe bet. Ubi’s franchises are guaranteed to sell. This makes launching new IP a big risk. That it comes at the dawn of a new hardware cycle is…
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Xbox has announced a list of 30 games, optimised for Xbox Series X and Series S hardware, that will be playable on launch day. The Xbox Series X and Series S launch windows are a bit bereft of exclusives. This is no secret and, while certainly a bummer, there’s still plenty to play the day…
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One of the biggest remaining questions for Sony ahead of its next big console launch was “What does the PS5 UI look like?” Sony finally got around to answering it last night during the latest State of Play broadcast. Respect the classics Visually, the PS5 UI bears quite a few similarities to the PS4’s menu,…
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Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is a game named for the grand hall of the slain in Norse mythology, a beautiful place where fallen warriors arrive after death. Perhaps as a contrast, the game is set in the rainy, muddy, utterly miserable north of Britain in the year 873 CE. At the time the Vikings crossed into…
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Look at this tasteful Blue Yeti X mic designed around World of Warcraft: Shadowlands. Seriously, look at it. The subdued palette in Battle Grey with gold accents. The artful runes around the mic’s base. The smooth, elegant shape of the mic itself. We don’t get a lot of peripherals in the games sphere that are…
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Sony has released a PS5 teardown video for its upcoming PlayStation 5 console. Yasuhiro Ootori, VP of SIE’s Mechanical Design Department, Hardware Design Division, slowly pulls a PlayStation 5 unit apart. In what might be the most formal voiding of a warranty ever recorded for posterity, Ootori-san explains each component as its removed. Ootori-san talks…
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From the first, the biggest question I’ve had about Watch Dogs Legion was if it could capitalise on its ambitious concept. It presents a dystopian vision of London held hostage under a fascist paramilitary rule. DedSec, the prolific hacker collective is working to destabilise the regime but they’re having a rough go of it. Numbers…
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In the wake of the PlayStation 4 E3 2013 press conference, Jerry Holkins of Penny Arcade called the event a “thunderously applauded public beheading.” Holkins’ assessment captures the moment with perfect clarity. So legendarily bungled was Microsoft’s unveiling of the Xbox One that all Sony had to do was gently, but clearly, rebuke it. Its…
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After the insanity that was Preorder Day, we thought it might be a good idea to put together a list of all the Xbox Series X accessories you can preorder in Australia. Bare in mind, stock appears to fairly limited for launch so don’t be too disappointed if you miss out, and know that you…
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The very first wave of PS5 accessories is on the way, and as we’re sure you can imagine, pre-order shipments are selling out fast. You’re going to need to move quickly if you want to snap any up. To make things a bit easier, we’ve rounded up all the official PS5 accessories dropping on launch…
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If you were hoping to replay Spider-Man: Remastered on your PS5, we bear some unfortunate news. We’ve known for a while that Insomniac’s Spider-Man was coming to PS5 alongside the stand-alone Miles Morales expansion. Questions have lingered over a potential upgrade path for Spider-Man PS4 owners moving to PS5. Fans who already own a PS4…
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“Today is a special day,” begins the most seismic announcement Phil Spencer has ever made. It certainly is. Xbox has announced overnight that it will acquire ZeniMax Media, the parent company of Bethesda Softworks. The deal, worth USD $7.5 billion, makes every studio under Bethesda’s umbrella and all of the IP they produce, from The Elder…
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Both the Xbox Series X and Series S will open preorders first thing tomorrow morning. See below for where you can preorder yours and make sure you secure a console at launch. Series X preorder will open at 8am AEST (that’s 7:30am ACST, 6:00am AWST, and 10am NZST) at retailers around the country. Pricing appears…
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The US Department of Commerce will force the removal of popular Chinese social media apps WeChat and TikTok from mobile stores as of Sunday, September 20. Following September 20, US users will no longer be able to download these apps from the iOS and Google Play stores. If you have the app on your phone…
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D&D Celebration 2020 kicks off VERY early on Saturday morning AEST, but we don’t reckon you’ll want to miss a minute of it. The festival is a huge celebration of Dungeons & Dragons, the world’s most popular tabletop roleplaying game, and it’s latest adventure book Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden. D&D Celebration will run…
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EB Games just put their PS5 preorders live. This is not a drill. You can preorder either the standard or digital-only consoles via the EB Games website right now, with a $200 deposit. EB are also pulling in some sweet trade deals if you don’t have enough cash lying around to pay full fare. The…
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The PlayStation 5 Showcase is here. The last big show-and-tell of 2020. A slew of brand new trailers and, as the curtain falls, the long awaited release date and pricing details. To say Sony left it all out on the court with this one is to undersell it. There’s a LOT to unpack here, so…
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The PlayStation 5 finally has pricing and a release date. With only two months to go before launch, we now know that both models of PlayStation 5 will launch in Australia and New Zealand on November 12. So how much should you expect one of these bad boys to set you back? Well, for…
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