Life is Strange – Episode One, like its protagonist Max, is kind of a weird kid. Part Twin Peaks, part Juno, with just a pinch of Veronica Mars, it borrows liberally from the episodic point-and-click formula that’s been so successful for Telltale Games. It does, however, try to present something we haven’t seen in the…
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Disney’s Fantasia: Music Evolved feels like a bit of a strange beast when you first encounter it – it’s a Kinect-controlled game based on Fantasia, Walt Disney’s 1940 love note to classical music. But this feeling of uncertainty lasts only as long as it takes to get into your first song which is where the…
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If you, gentle reader, are anything like me then you might spend an inordinate amount of time lamenting the near-extinction of couch co-op as a multiplayer component. All but gone are the days of having a few friends over and playing a game together on the same screen, in the same room, competitively or cooperatively….
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The Lego series’ core gameplay loop is extremely familiar by now. You jump from character to character and smash your way through a series of levels, punching baddies and solving rather basic puzzles in order to proceed. Obsessive collecting of lego studs is rewarded with unlockable characters, vehicles and even stages. This loop has seen…
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LittleBigPlanet 3 is the first main title in Sony’s long-running series of creativity-focused platformers not to be developed by series creators Media Molecule. Developers Sumo Digital have been tasked with taking Sackboy on it’s latest adventure and, though they do a respectable job for the most part, LittleBigPlanet 3 still falls short of everything it…
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The Wii U’s most hotly anticipated title is finally here. Super Smash Bros. for Wii U has been a very long time coming indeed and for fans of the series keen to beat their friends up all over again, it’s everything you ever wanted from a Smash Bros title and much, much more.
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I’m kind of a comic book nut. When Telltale Games announced that they were releasing a noir point-and-click adventure based on Bill Willingham’s FABLES series of graphic novels, I was pretty excited. Though The Wolf Among Us released earlier this year in it’s entirety on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC, the game has just seen…
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Where do you start with a game like Dragon Age: Inquisition? Bioware have unleashed on an unprepared world a game with so much to see and do that it defies belief. Bioware have taken the lessons they learned from Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age II and their mechanically similar Mass Effect series and applied them…
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I am what could be called an Assassin’s Creed apologist. I’ve defended the series against hyper-critical friends and co-workers, I even managed to find things to like about Assassin’s Creed III — and everyone hated that one. Where many have grown weary of the series since it became a yearly franchise, I’ve continued to look…
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Halo: The Master Chief Collection is an anthology title comprised of all four games starring the enduringly popular one-man-army (and unofficial Xbox mascot) Master Chief. For Halo fans anxiously awaiting the next entry in the series, Halo 5: Guardians, the Master Chief Collection offers a comprehensive stroll down memory lane in the interim. This collection…
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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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Welcome to Zombie country! Mountain Sheep (producers of Ice Rage, KingHunt and Bike Baron) have moved on from the ‘Furries’ of their original iOS release and thankfully broadened their horizons, adding to an already popular Minigore game with a Zombie laden multi-platform sequel. Simple gaming aesthetics, a new view option and some interesting special guests add to the gory…
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Even though R18+ classification legislation was passed in Australia nearly two years ago, there have been lengthy delays around official game releases to the public. So unless local stores had exercised their right to parallel import games early (completely legal), gamers were left to frustratingly bide their time. For Mortal Kombat fans however, this may have been…
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All hail Super Meat Boy! This chunky little character consisting of a sloppy cube of meat, is as hilarious and fun to navigate as his gaming forefathers, made popular for their simplicity, difficulty and clever use of odd concepts. This funky gem created by developers Team Meat, may have succeeded in bringing the excitement and gameplay of…
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