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.
Sunset Overdrive is Californian developer Insomniac Games (noted for PlayStation exclusives like Ratchet & Clank and Resistance) first Xbox One exclusive, a frantic, idiosyncratic, open-world third-person shooter that pulls elements from a number of different games and combines them, with a twisted sense of humour, to create something that feels quite fresh and different.
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On first inspection, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor wasn’t a title that interested me overmuch when it was announced last year. It looked too derivative of games like Assassin’s Creed or Batman: Arkham City, with its parkour-happy ranger and free-flow combat. This year’s holiday season games crop has been very good at subverting expectations, though, and…
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When The Creative Assembly (the Total War series) announced their decision to create a survival horror game based on Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci fi masterpiece Alien, the sour taste of Aliens: Colonial Marines was still strong in our mouths. It was difficult to view the decision as anything other than a profound mistake. Thankfully, The…
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Project Spark is kind of a hard game to review. The reason for this is that it’s hard to describe it as a game, per se. It’s a game that allows you to create games, and some pretty complex ones at that. It’s another in a flurry of titles in this post-Minecraft world that are…
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Racing games, especially the sort that cater to the street racing culture enthusiast, have never been my cup of tea. The boastful, arrogant swagger of the souped up cars themselves always seem to be given a higher priority than decent gameplay. When I loaded up Forza Horizon 2 and it began with a live-action cinematic…
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Flockers is the newest title from Team17, the venerable studio behind the enduring Worms franchise, and their first new IP in ten years. It’s a puzzle title that is very much of the capital-o, capital-s Old School. Recalling classic titles like Lemmings, it’s not the first (to coin a term) Lemminglike to come out in…
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Destiny is an ambitious FPS/MMO hybrid by console shooter demagogues Bungie and published by the similarly monolithic Activision, it’s a game that wears it’s Halo-inspired DNA proudly on its sleeve. It’s a game that is determined to be different, to stride into this new hardware generation and show us something we’ve never seen before. In…
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Naughty Dog’s decision to remaster their newly crowned PS3 masterwork The Last of Us and release it on PlayStation 4 around a year after it’s initial release just seemed like a weird move. Despite the studio’s hard-won integrity and reputation for excellent content, it felt like they were attempting to trade on the enormous goodwill…
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