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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Xbox Australia and Eventbrite are opening a pop up gaming hotel in Sydney that will allow guests a chance to go hands on with the new Xbox One X console ahead of launch. Feel like a sleep over?
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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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Thursday was a bit of a day for Microsoft. They’ve had an OS update drop, the launch of an experimental new piece of hardware and the announcement of some updated kit. Check it all out after the jump.
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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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As I write this, Assassin’s Creed Origins releases in exactly one month from today. It is, quite rightly, the subject of a bit of scrutiny from fans and detractors of the series alike. The first title to break with the series’ long running annual release pattern in quite a while, Origins has a lot of questions to answer….
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Given that it was built from the ground up to be a showcase for the Xbox One X console launching in November, it feels a bit weird to be reviewing Forza Motorsport 7 on my Day One launch edition Xbox One. Racing games have been enlisted as gorgeous tech demo for fresh hardware, don’t go in thinking the…
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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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Love it or hate it, the single most important Australian contribution to the Xbox family this side of Forza Horizon 3, the Xbox Onesie, is coming back. The new garment, with an updated design, is set to drop just days after the release of Forza Motorsport 7.
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By now you’ve almost certainly heard about Cuphead and its pronounced level of difficulty so let’s begin this review with a declaration: Cuphead is hard. But it’s also way less hard than you might think it is. Having just spent the weekend with the SNES Mini and being reminded of what true old school game design was like,…
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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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So you managed to snag a preorder on the Xbox One X before they sold out. Fantastic effort, great job! But what the hell are you going to play on it, and which games will allow you to take advantage of all that raw power? Xbox Australia invited us to a hands on event in…
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The Xbox One X has been met with a bit of bemusement by Australian gaming hobbyists so far. First we couldn’t pre-order the machine but could instead go on a waitlist. Then it was announced that the unit was cost Aussie punters a whopping $649.95 AUD. Then pre-orders for the machine finally opened but the…
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It is a truth universally acknowledged that powerful new video game consoles must be in want of a pretty racing game for their launch lineup.
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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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Rockstar Games has announced overnight, seemingly out of nowhere, that its 2011 open world crime procedural L.A. Noire is coming to Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch (!!) and the HTC Vive (!!!) this year.
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Monster Hunter World is all about sanding down some of the series’ rougher edges. Gone are loading screens between areas, replaced with a single, expansive world (hence the game’s title). Combat remains a visceral experience, perhaps even more so than ever. The crafting retains the depth that makes it so rewarding to spend the time prepping…
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As of this filing, I will have now reviewed fully three instalments of the Madden NFL series for this website. Reviewing sports titles, as I’ve mentioned in previous reviews, is one of the easier aspects of the gig as a games critic — the games don’t change much year-to-year and they are, by and large, quite…
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Written by author Ken Follett in his 1989 novel, The Pillars of the Earth is a wildly popular story about the building of a cathedral in a small town in 12th century England. It is a long and sweeping story, and one of the most popular literary works of the last two decades. It also makes…
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Ubisoft’s forthcoming action RPG South Park: The Fractured But Whole has made it through the Australian Board of Classification without a single cut.
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