• Sniper Elite 4 (Rebellion, Multiformat)

    April 15, 2017 - By 

    Whereas most modern first person shooters are looking to the future for inspiration (notably, the much maligned Call Of Duty: Infinite Warfare), this gleefully violent game instead looks to the past – or at least a ludicrously stylised retelling of the past. In this version of World War II, and in the epitome of Boy’s Own wish fulfilment, it only takes one man to bring down an entire fascist regime. That man is Karl Fairburne, a lantern-jawed Rick Dangerous type who is preternaturally gifted at operating a sniper rifle and amoral enough to use it without losing any sleep. To…

  • Horizon Zero Dawn (Sony, PS4)

    April 11, 2017 - By 

    Let’s cut to the chase: Horizon Zero Dawn is fantastic. A rewarding, surprising romp set in a vividly realised open world that grows deeper and more engrossing the more hours that you choose to pour into it. Sure, at first it feels like a greatest hits compilation of bits culled from other, equally successful games. You can hunt wildlife and liberate bandit camps like in Far Cry, scale constructions and kill people from above or below as in Assassin’s Creed, and the expansive, varied game world has the depth and breadth of Skyrim. None of these are negative comparisons, of…

  • The Sad and Beautiful World of Sparklehorse @ The MAC, Belfast

    April 10, 2017 - By 

    Few events in Belfast are likely to be as emotionally charged as this evening’s tribute to Sparklehorse. Anyone familiar with the band’s output -and it immediately transpires that not one soul in tonight’s intimate gathering does not hold every beat, note and lyric in their hearts – will already know that frontman Mark Linkous took his own life seven years ago. That fact, tragically, is unavoidable, and there is certainly no avoiding the spectral shadow that such an unnecessary and painful loss casts over the entirety of Linkous’ back catalogue. It is impossible to listen to his music without feeling…

  • The Last Guardian (Sony, PS4)

    February 24, 2017 - By 

    For many years, the latest release from Team Ico was an industry legend, a Keyser Soze spook story that was told and retold at conventions, games expos and in occasional “Where Are They Now?” articles. Yes, there was the occasional screenshot and the whispering of a plot synopsis but aside from those scant details, no physical product appeared and no firm release date was forthcoming. This, of course, is not unusual. Famously, Resident Evil 2 went through multiple iterations and false starts before its final, universally lauded form. Platformer Fez, as documented in Indie Game: The Movie, endured a protracted…

  • Dead Rising 4 (Capcom, PC / Xbox One)

    January 5, 2017 - By 

    Nothing says knockabout fun like a zombie apocalypse! As unlikely as it might seem, this wilfully silly premise informs Capcom’s sequel, in which the hapless hero Frank West is once again drawn back to the fictional city of Williamette, which, for reasons too perfunctory to repeat here, has once again been overrun by the undead. Only one man, it seems, is capable of rerouting zombiegeddon, and that man is a jobbing photojournalist with more pithy quips than Ash Williams. There are several things that Dead Rising 4 gets right. Firstly, the sheer number of the slobbering, groaning, shambling onscreen at…

  • Dishonored 2 (Bethesda Softworks, Multiformat)

    December 29, 2016 - By 

    Freedom. Many videogames claim to offer it yet few actually deliver it. Sure, designers have figured out ingenious ways of presenting the illusion of freedom, as the folk behind this year’s debacle of No Man’s Sky learnt to their great cost. The PR machine behind the release of that game promised millions of planets to explore, almost infinite species to discover, countless resources to gather, all of which were supposed to add up to billions – yes, billions – of hours of gameplay. This is pure silliness of course. Not even Peter “Insania” Andre would believe such an outlandish claim.…

  • Watch Dogs 2 (Ubisoft, Multiformat)

    December 20, 2016 - By 

    Possible responses to a question about computer hacking: 1)    Love it, bae! I stole my dad’s password on Amazon and I ordered the new Maroon 5 album without him knowing. Hacking FTW!!! 2)    Are you trying to arp poison my LAN? 3)    Derp. Derp. Derp? Derp. 4)    Pool’s closed. If none of the previous phrases make any sense to you – and why would they? – then you are most likely to be bamboozled by Watch Dogs 2, Ubisoft’s sequel of sorts to its open-world hack-‘em-up from two years ago. Although widely vaunted during its long gestation in development limbo,…

  • Bioshock: The Collection (2K Games, Multiformat)

    December 6, 2016 - By 

    What if anything truly was possible? Anything at all, no matter how outlandish, unlikely or, depending on your own proclivities, morally wrong, was within your grasp. You could think of an object, place, person or talent, and it would be given to you, almost entirely free of charge, and you could use these things entirely as you saw fit. It is an intriguing if slightly worrying question, and one that leads on to other intriguing if slightly worrying questions, chief of which is the thorny philosophical debate over causality: do all actions have a reaction, and do all causes have…

  • Titanfall 2 (EA, Multiformat)

    November 23, 2016 - By 

    For many gamers, there was a period during which the First Person Shooter genre had become staid, repetitive and stymied by a nagging sense of violence for violence’s sake. The Call Of Duty series, if you pardon the pun, increasingly came under fire for its juvenile reliance on shock tactics, narrative cruelty and an amoral central conceit: shoot, stab, garrotte or blow to smithereens anyone that gets in your way. Of course, this bear-baiting was in part stirred up by a media that knows as much about videogame culture as a duck knows about embroidery, but there was an important…

  • The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – Special Edition (Bethesda, Multiformat)

    November 14, 2016 - By 

    Traversing a vast, beautiful terrain. Investigating ancient ruins, abandoned mines, towers, oubliettes and outposts. Crafting spells, recipes and potions. Renting a room in a remote hilltop inn. Becoming a vampire. Becoming a werewolf. Becoming a thief and an expert pickpocket. Joining a school of wizards. Being inducted into a sacred order of magical monks. Spelunking in subterranean caverns. Buying a house and filling it with whatever random kipple you desire. Buying a castle and doing the same. Getting married. Buying, selling, trading and stealing. Learning the art of blacksmithing. Hunting down a headless horseman. Fighting dragons. Taming dragons. Riding on…