Features

Ghost of Tsushima marks the end of an era. It is the final first-party exclusive for the PlayStation 4, which is both bittersweet and hard to believe. Ghost of Tsushima is an open-world samurai adventure developed by Sucker Punch. It recalls the drama and majesty of Kurosawa in full flight, putting players in the shoes…

In case you weren’t up at 5am for this morning’s first-ever Ubisoft Forward broadcast, don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. Below you’ll find every major trailer from today’s show in order of appearance. We’ve got AAA blockbusters, new mobile addictions, next-gen peeks and more. #CheckALook below. Watch Dogs Legion Brawlhalla Mobile Might & Magic: Era…

Have you ever wanted to play D&D but you aren’t sure where to start, or even how the game works? The latest D&D Live festival, an annual celebration of the world’s most popular role-playing game, may be the best, simplest, and most instructive lesson in how to play this side of Critical Role. Playing Dungeons…

The Last of Us Part II is almost upon us (finally!). One of the most anticipated video games of the last seven years, it promises to take the story of Ellie and Joel in an entirely new direction. Its soundtrack features licensed tracks from folk acts like Crooked Still and Shawn James, but the main…

Free games. Are there two more beautiful words in the English language? We’re no linguists, but we don’t reckon there are. As the world commits to staying at home in isolation, we naturally turn to video games as a way to pass the time. But as the economy crumbles and jobs disappear every day, it…

When your goal is to remake a game like Final Fantasy VII, where do you even begin? Lets set aside its legendary status and the pressure of delivering on such a project. Consider instead the more intricate moving parts — its characters, mechanics and systems, its visuals, art direction, and score. Its sheer size presents…

Time to admit it: you need a gift guide. It’s a few days to Chrimbo and you’ve only just realised because you’ve been playing Death Stranding. You’ll be at the shopping centre this weekend to see Star Wars which presents an opportunity to do some last minute Christmas shopping. But what do you get the…

It hasn’t been easy to choose as a Game of the Year for 2019. This has been a pivotal year for the games industry. With new consoles on the horizon, and several high profile AAA titles delaying into early 2020, independent games have been able to take the spotlight in a big way. The games…

If you read over our Game of the Year list for 2019 and thought there were a few missing titles, there’s a reason for that. We simply can’t fit them all. In fact, there were so many great titles to come out in 2019 that we felt running a single list didn’t feel quite fair….

The Asus Zenbook Pro Duo UX181GV is a legitimate monster. Two 4K touchscreens. A 9th Gen Intel i9 processor running at 2.4GHz, speed boosted up to a crazy 5.0GHz. A huge 32GB DDR4 RAM. A 1TB SSD. A 6GG GDDR6 Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 graphics card. One of the most powerful laptops I’ve ever encountered,…

I’ve wanted to play a pick-up game of Dungeons & Dragons since attending the very first PAX Australia back in 2013. That inaugural year was the only time I’ve ever attended the show as a punter — by the time the show moved from Melbourne Showgrounds to Jeff’s Shed in 2014, I’d started writing here…

Dino Verano has a long career in games, working as a producer on numerous Activision titles. He’s also someone who understands the value of community in helping to polish and balance a game ahead of launch thanks to his prior career in quality assurance. Now a producer and team lead on Infinity Ward’s Call of…

Gaming was a whole other world in 2011. Skyrim, Arkham City, Portal 2 and Dark Souls had arrived, changing the face of games as we know it. Open worlds were in vogue, indies were out, killing was cool and games were only for ‘true’ gamers. Saints Row: The Third was released in this strange hyper-masculine…

Despite having 45 years of history, revisions and different rulesets under its belt, getting into Dungeons & Dragons remains intimidating for many. Between the dense rulebooks and multifaceted character sheets, on-boarding new players has ever been the game’s most significant hurdle. It’s not a great look when accessing The Fun Part of your game means…

Sniper Elite V2 Remastered is pretty unimpressive to look at. After all, when you’re retooling an already murky shooter from 2012, there’s only so much you can do to improve things. Thankfully, Sniper Elite V2‘s gameplay surpasses its muddy visuals and pushes them to the wayside because looks don’t matter so much when you can…

Final Fantasy XII is the latest in the iconic franchise to head to Nintendo Switch. This edition, The Zodiac Age, is an expanded version of an existing remaster localised for the first time in 2017 on the PlayStation 4. Like the majority of Final Fantasy remasters, ports and what-have-yous, the game looks slick, plays smoothly and…

On the list of most ridiculous things that have ever happened to me, being flown to the other side of the world to play a video game for an hour and a half may take the cake. On Monday, 2K Games ANZ flew a small pack of journos and influencers to Los Angeles to be…

Final Fantasy X is often spoken of in the same breath as the phrase, ‘the best game of all time.’ Released in 2001, it was the first Final Fantasy title to receive a sequel, and both games have since been remastered for new audiences in the Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster bundle. Originally released for…

They say you always remember your first time, but the original Borderlands was determined to prove this wrong. With a muted colour palette, confusing map system and generic post-apocalyptic worlds, it was good – but not memorable. Borderlands GOTY Edition is memorable! The original game has been given a complete facelift with this remaster, and…

There were a lot of raised eyebrows going around when PlayStation announced late last year that they’d be pulling out of E3 2019. PlayStation’s departure from the show floor and the cancellation of their annual press conference meant that competitor Microsoft would be the last of The Big Three hardware makers to have a press…

I’m not far into One Piece: World Seeker. It’s a solid game with fun mechanics and a great cast of characters – but I’m having trouble making progress. See, in the game, you play as Monkey D. Luffy, One Piece‘s long-serving protagonist (going on a good 22 years now). He’s got rubber powers, which basically…

Crackdown 3 is a game about an agency of highly trained, superpowered cops taking back the city of New Providence from the claws of an evil corporate empire called Terranova. Each sector of the city is overseen by a different brutal crimelord under Terranova’s control. The game’s main campaign has the player baiting these supervillains…

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…

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…

I’ve been looking everywhere for what might be good gaming merchandise. I’ve trawled through official sites, brick-and-mortar stores and even outlets like Red Bubble. I have to admit, there’s not a whole lot of variety across all three of these, and what’s there is usually not that good, covered in brands or weird quotes or…

It’s December! Which means presents, sales, friends, family… aaand End of Year Events across a range of games! It’s always great – developers preparing content to see the year off with their player-base, usually around a winter-Christmas theme, content to be playable and fresh through until the next year… it’s almost a tradition of online games to…

The shotgun is an immortal video game weapon. It’s simple — you click, they die. No arguments. If its a video game with guns in it, and most of them are, and it doesn’t have a shotgun in it … I mean, what are we even doing here? Its roots are deep, with the most…

In 2018, most new releases across the board from AAA video game titles are around 40 gigabytes in size. This is huge when you consider that games were much lower not too long ago. Skyrim was only 6GB when it was released in 2011. Assassins Creed II was 8GB in 2010, and Crysis was 7GB…

2018 has been crazy good for RPG’s. The worlds that have been massive and immersive, and deep in content. What is curious is how the developers of these games let players in on the facts of the worlds they’ve built. Information is given to players in interesting ways that differ from game-to-game. From letting players…

We have, if you can believe, almost reached the end of the current generation of consoles, and with news of PlayStation pulling out of E3 in 2019 in rumoured preparation of a hardware announcement, speculation is mounting as to what the selling points could be for the next generation. 2019 is going to be an…