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Mini Review Headbangers Rhythm Royale (PS5) - Musical Party Game Is Frustrating and Fun
Let's get this bread
Glee Cheese Studio's Headbangers Rhythm Royale is the latest in a growing roster of battle royale party games. Heavily reminiscent of Fall Guys, the game sees floppy-headed pigeons duke it out in rhythm-based puzzles. Thirty competitors fight to earn the coveted title of master headbanger. You'll be familiar with the format by...
Mini Review Hellboy Web of Wyrd (PS5) - Visually Striking, But Fails to Inspire as a Brawler
Don't mess with him, he's been drinking with skeletons
The tumultuous multimedia journey of Anung Un Rama continues with Hellboy Web of Wyrd — a roguelike brawler that might help wash away the taste of the abysmal 2019 cinematic reboot. Developer Upstream Arcade has attempted to transpose the visual style and narrative spirit of Hellboy from the...
Review Company of Heroes 3 (PS5) - Veteran RTS Series Enjoys Pyrrhic Victory on PS5
Fire in the hole
After almost two decades of setting the standard for WWII real-time strategy on PC, Relic Entertainment's venerable series reaches PS5 with Company of Heroes 3. Burdened by a hefty legacy, it's another valiant attempt at streamlining the genre's interface for controllers. It succeeds in part, but the masterful combat is at odds with...
Mini Review Zool Redimensioned (PS4) - Blast from the Past Packs Neat Modern Features
Return of the ninja
Gremlin Interactive has a storied history, dating back to the early days of console gaming. Developing titles for Commodore 64, marshalling the Premiere Manager series through several generations, and later heading to PlayStation (anybody remember cult isometric shooter Loaded and its sequel?) — it's safe to say it has a varied...
Mini Review Strayed Lights (PS5) - Defence Is the Best Medicine in This Mysterious Adventure
Artful dodger
Demonstrating a striking visual style from the outset, Strayed Lights is an indie fantasy that opens with an abstract sensory assault. A newborn spark (a fitting first protagonist for dev studio Embers) staggers out of a cave into a vast, alien landscape. Quickly evolving into adult form and battling a shadowy version of itself, it...
Review Atomic Heart (PS5) - Alt History Shooter with an Identity Crisis
SovietShock
An alternate history set in the wake of World War II. A technological utopia hiding terrible secrets. A square-jawed, bloodthirsty protagonist. Mick Gordon spewing fire from the speakers. You'd be forgiven for thinking Bethesda just stealth-dropped another Wolfenstein. Alas, this isn't a new adventure for the Blazkowicz family, but it...
Preview EA Sports PGA Tour Makes a Promising Swing at a Familiar Golf Sim
Hole in one?
It's been seven long years since a golf game had the EA Sports logo on the box. Dominating the genre since 1990, the publisher took a step back after Rory McIlroy PGA Tour in 2015, letting 2K Sports shoulder its way to the front of the pack. Now, the licence switches hands again on PS5 with the simply named EA Sports PGA Tour, boasting...
Mini Review Return to Monkey Island (PS5) - Original Creators Return to Beloved Point and Click
Rubber chicken with pulley optional
We find the mighty pirate Guybrush Threepwood sitting on a park bench, a bit older but not necessarily wiser. He is relaying the tale of a quest from The Secret of Monkey Island to a familiar youngster. The story that plays out is essentially the greatest hits of his first two adventures, with a sprinkling of...
Mini Review Hardspace: Shipbreaker (PS5) - Slow But Satisfying Ship Scrapping
Job's a goodun
In these uncertain times of economic instability, what better way to unwind than to play a game in which you're an indentured labourer, working off an impossible debt? Hardspace: Shipbreaker has you scrapping gigantic vessels to chip away at a huge financial obligation to the Lynx Corporation. This clearly shady conglomerate has you...
Review Aliens: Fireteam Elite (PS5) - Competent Co-Op That Entertains But Is At Odds with Itself
Prep for dust off, we need immediate evac
To say that video game adaptations of the Alien franchise are hit and miss is a bit of an understatement. On the one hand, we have genre-defining classics like Alien vs Predator (1999) and Alien: Isolation. Then there's Aliens: Colonial Marines, a release besmirched by industry lies. Isolation succeeded by...
Badge of honour
The World Ends With You launched in 2007 on Nintendo DS and quickly gained a cult following despite that year being packed with a seemingly endless supply of classics. Designed by Kingdom Hearts director Tetsuya Nomura, it was a darker variant of the usual Square Enix RPG formula. Taking a modern setting, a prescient focus on memetic...
Hands On NEO: The World Ends With You Brings a Stylish Afterlife to PS4
Put a pin in it
A little-known but well-loved entry in Square Enix's JRPG pantheon, The World Ends With You is a unique experience with gorgeous art from Kingdom Hearts director Tetsuyo Nomura. The game looked at concepts like social media influence and memetic learning way before those things were as pervasive as they are today. Nomura's designs,...
Hands On Co-Op Puzzle Adventure It Takes Two Offers Outrageous Variety
Toy story
After the grounded reality of his co-op prison break game A Way Out, film director and game designer Josef Fares is returning to the bright fantasy of his studio’s debut game, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. It Takes Two follows May and Cody, soon-to-be divorcees who find themselves enchanted into dolls by their daughter. The distraught...
Mini Review Torchlight III - Torchlight Returns with a Familiar Dungeon Crawling Adventure
The owl or the retriever?
Torchlight III has had a somewhat troubled development. With original developer Runic Games, it was tooled as a free-to-play MMO called Torchlight Frontiers. After poor fan and dev reactions, Echtra Games — a team made up of Torchlight and Diablo luminaries — was formed. It acquired the license and rebuilt the project...
Review Inertial Drift - Arcade Racing with a Twist
Neon dreams
It feels like ages since we’ve had a decent arcade racer on PlayStation. Quick thrills often take a back seat to realism and vehicle calibration. Thankfully, Belfast-based dev Level 91 has channelled the likes of Burnout and Ridge Racer for its neon-drenched title Inertial Drift. There are no comprehensive difficulty modifiers here;...
Review Samurai Jack: Battle Through Time - Jack Returns in a Simple But Fun Brawler
He has a bad feeling about this...
Between 1995 and 2005, Cartoon Network gave us some of the greatest animation ever produced by any lone studio; Dexter’s Laboratory, Powerpuff Girls, Johnny Bravo, and the original animated Clone Wars is just some of the quality output of that period. Yet, towering above even those fantastic shows, was Genndy...
Mini Review Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus - Stylish, Turn-Based Tactical Combat
Cyberpunk 40k
The Adeptus Mechanicus is a faction of cybernetically enhanced warrior priests. They seek divinity through the pursuit of knowledge and consider organic flesh as a form of weakness. Your enjoyment of Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus will hinge on how you engage with a fusion of religious iconography and cyberpunk. The Tech-priests of the...
Review Disintegration - Squad-Based Tactical FPS from Halo Co-Creator Unfortunately Misses the Mark
Robot Wars
Marcus Lehto was the creative art director at Bungie for 15 years. During that time he helped create and grow Halo, a series that’s arguably as influential in the FPS arena as DOOM, Half-Life, or Call of Duty. Breaking away from Bungie in 2012 to form independent studio V1 Interactive, he began work on Disintegration, intending to...
Review One Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows - You Too Can Defeat Any Enemy with the Press of a Button
One hit wonder
Starting life as a viral webcomic back in 2009, One Punch Man is a celebration and a send-up of superhero fiction. It’s creator, aptly named One, envisaged the story of a hero who was already the best. Tired of being able to defeat every enemy he faces with one punch, protagonist Saitama worries more about missing the supermarket...
Review BioShock: The Collection - Return to Rapture and Columbia in This Solid Set of Remasters
As above, so below
Republished on Wednesday 29th January 2020: We're bringing this review back from the archives following the announcement of February's PlayStation Plus lineup. The original text follows. When it was released in 2007, BioShock was hailed as a masterpiece by the gaming press and remains to this day a high watermark for the...
Game of the Year Ken's Top 5 PS4 Games of 2019
Turning Japanese
Alongside our staff-voted Game of the Year awards, each of our writers have crafted their own personal lists, covering their top five PlayStation 4 titles of 2019. Today, it's the turn of reviewer Ken Talbot. 5. Kingdom Hearts III: The (very) long awaited return of Disney and Square Enix's mega collaboration Kingdom Hearts, this...
Review Trine 4: The Nightmare Prince - Gorgeous Puzzle Platformer Is a Return to Form
Saving the kingdom, one floating box at a time
The first two games in Frozenbyte’s Trine series were whimsical 2D puzzle platformers. A third title, Artifacts of Power, switched to 3D and offered a shorter adventure that left some fans cold. Trine 4 throws away that extra dimension, and feels much more like the series at its best. Returning...
Bustin' makes me feel... Okay
By now we all know what horrors lurk in the game-to-movie adaptation genre - it's an stained black spot on our beloved medium’s history. Movie-to-game adaptations, however, aren't quite as consistently terrible - some are quite the opposite. For every instance of shovelware licensing (hello, Spider-Man 3), there are...
Review Agatha Knife - A Sweet Natured and Deeply Disturbing Adventure
All the little animals
Agatha is a little girl who loves animals. She also likes to kill them, because stocking her mother’s struggling butcher shop makes her happy. She hates that her furry friends look sad when they face their end. Agatha tries to quell her sadness and insomnia by creating a religion in the hopes of revitalising her mother’s...
