I sense a disturbance in the Force, as if a million voices cried out in anger and were suddenly victorious. With only a few hours remaining before it officially launches in the US, EA have announced that Star Wars Battlefront II will no longer offer paid microtransactions.
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I know, I know, it’s a review of a cricket game. Those of you that don’t care about cricket have already regarded the headline of this piece with a disgusted look. Those of you that do like cricket are already wary. Video game representations of sports Australians like aren’t reliably … good. At all. But…
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Star Wars Battlefront II, a game mired in launch window controversy. Is it as terrible as the screaming denizens of the internet would have you believe or is it all being blown out of proportion? For our Battlefront II review, we thought we’d split it into two discrete components — the single player campaign, reviewed by…
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Hello there, fellow Sonic fan. Remember that period of unalloyed joy during the launch of Sonic Mania this year? The feeling of burgeoning hope that, after 20 years of Sega openly ignoring what made their mascot great, the ol’ blue blur might finally be back on track? Well, forget all that because Sonic Forces is here to make…
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If I can communicate anything to you about Need for Speed Payback, it’s this: when the game first asks you to pick a car, choose wisely. Choose wisely, because you’re going to have that car for a really, really long time.
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Following player ire regarding Star Wars Battlefront II‘s implementation of loot box and XP progression systems during the game’s last beta period, Electronic Arts and developer DICE have announced a re-balancing of both systems in time for launch.
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If you, or someone you know, could be considered a fan of rugby then there might come a point in your life where playing Rugby 18 seems like a good idea. I want you to know from the bottom of my heart that that won’t be true. That way lies disappointment and regret because in Rugby 18,…
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Oh boy, where does one start with an experience like the one Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus offers? The second game in a week to prove that the single-player experience as we know it is still very much alive and well, Wolfenstein II is the kind of shooter we haven’t had in a while — one with a…
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Paris Games Week kicks off bright any early tomorrow morning and Sony aren’t wasting any time. Tweeting that “E3 was only half the story,” the publisher is promising a barrage of announcements from their press conference.
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Sony have unveiled a brand new trailer for Naughty Dog’s upcoming The Last of Us Part II during their Paris Games Week media conference. The trailer is curiously devoid of any appearance by series heroes Ellie or Joel, but does feature another popular Naughty Dog player. It is also not for the squeamish.
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Christmas arrived a little early this year. PlayStation’s media conference kicked off Paris Games Week with a bang — some solid AAA trailers and a metric tonne of fabulous indie titles to look forward to. There’s a lot to cover so we’ve put every trailer Sony had to show off in one place just because…
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Assassin’s Creed Origins is a greatest hits of modern action-adventure game design. In seeking to update the series’ ageing core mechanics and design, Origins looks to its genre stablemates to see what they’re doing and where it can’t subtly imitate them, it copies them brazenly instead. What surprised me the most about this smash-and-grab design philosophy…
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The Evil Within 2 is an interesting sequel of sorts. If falls into a weird mix of fun, frustrating, wonderfully weird and scary all at the same time. While it’s not a bad game by any means, but for every positive, there’s a negative. Presenting players with a sequel that attempts to carry on an…
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Gran Turismo Sport is one of the most interesting racing titles I’ve played in years. This is for many different reasons, some good, and some surprisingly bad. While it has its rough edges, rest assured this is most definitely a great game with a ton of things to love — but dated and bland ideas…
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Melbourne developer Big Ant are no strangers to including women’s teams in their cricket titles. Last year’s Don Bradman Cricket 17 also featured women’s cricket in prominent modes and the developer’s newest title, Ashes Cricket, is doing the same. Ashes Cricket will also go the extra step of authentically modelling popular, real world female players in the same level of…
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Middle-earth: Shadow of War is a game suffering an identity crisis. It knows what it wants to be and makes genuinely big strides in that direction, but it’s hampered by what seems to be publisher interference. Even at the surface level, it feels like a case study for the growing divide in AAA between developer…
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When you first jump into South Park: The Fractured But Whole, you pick up from where the last game, The Stick of Truth, and the last episode of the TV series (Season 21, Episode 4 “Franchise Prequel”), leave off. The boys have stopped playing a Lord of the Rings style quest and are now building their own…
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Gaming peripheral manufacturer Turtle Beach launched a new series of wireless headsets this week. The Stealth 600 and Stealth 700 are bit of a funny combo, aiming to please those who value style and cord cutting ease of use and the high-end customer looking for excellent positional sound.
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Hot off the heels of a hands on with Forza Motorsport 7, the most visible racing series in recent memory, I went into my preview session with Gran Turismo Sport wondering if the elder statesman of racing games could make an impression given its effusive competition. It did, and what’s more, I realised I’d missed GT a little.
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NHL 18 wants to be a mirror to this year’s Stanley Cup — no bells, no whistles, no brawls or bullshit, just great skillful hockey. That’s what it wants, and it’s a noble goal, but sadly the puck never quite finds the back of the net.
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The NBA 2k series has dominated the basketball simulator landscape for about a decade now and, with NBA 2K18 finally on our shelves, it’s safe to say that this series still holds the crown. Quite simply, this is the best NBA game you can play right now. Coming up against the NBA Live series for the first…
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Project Cars 2 is an interesting experience. While it’s first outing presented players with stiff controls, a lack of car variety and overall depth, Project Cars 2 attempts to rectify these issues, while bringing back the racing simulator into the mainstream. But can it top the likes of Gran Turismo or Forza Motorsport? While the…
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Dishonored: Death of the Outsider takes former-apprentice assassin Billie Lurk, a character the series has heretofore considered little more than a side-kick, and catapults her into the spotlight as a lead. The final game in the current Dishonored series hands Billie an unenviable task — find and kill the Outsider.
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XCOM 2 is, at its heart, a game about loss. It’s why save-scumming, the act of loading an earlier save in an effort to avoid catastrophe, is so frowned upon in the game’s community. Losing valuable soldiers isn’t just a part of the game, it fills out the unscripted narrative of your personal XCOM 2 experience….
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I thought I was prepared for The Evil Within 2. “Psychological horror,” I thought, “I can do that.” The moment that the first nightmare broke through a mirror and attempted to chainsaw me to death, I realised just how wrong I was. The playthrough started with series protagonist Sebastian Castellanos making his way through an…
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Destiny was the first game I reviewed for this site, back when the games section was still called VideAU Games, an offshoot of The Iris‘ parent site, The AU Review. On launch, it was an ambitious but deeply flawed experiment in the MMO space, hyped beyond almost any other game in recent memory. It weathered two major…
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Last month I had the chance to spend a couple of hours with South Park: The Fractured But Whole, a game which literally picks up from where the last game, 2014’s The Stick of Truth, left off. The boys are still playing wizards, and as The New Kid, your quest to impress your classmates continues —…
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When I was a kid, I was obsessed with dinosaurs. I know I’m not the only one. I loved (and continue to love) The Land Before Time and Jurassic Park, I read every book on them I could find, I inhaled the Dinotopia novels, I spent more time on DinoPark Tycoon in the primary school’s computer room than I…
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There’s two kinds of people in this world — people who played Okami back in 2007 and those who did not. Originally released here in Australia on the PlayStation 2 a full year after its Japanese and American launch, and only in a very limited run (the 2000’s were a dark time), Capcom have announced that Okami…
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Yakuza Kiwami is the sum of every other game in the series. I don’t know that it would exist without every other game that has preceeded it (though I guess, if you want to be pedantic, most come after it in the greater series timeline). What Yakuza Kiwami can’t quite do is bring itself to be better than…
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