• Gears of War Ultimate Edition (Microsoft, Xbox One)

    October 14, 2015 - By 

    Grunting. Shooting. Explosions. Fist pumps. The simple formula at the core of the Gears Of War franchise is by no means original but there is no denying its world dominating success. Upon its original release in 2006, GOW was for many the reason to invest in an Xbox 360, thanks to its finely honed shoot and cover mechanics, inventive world and a single player campaign that dared to tell an engaging narrative instead of functioning as a taster for the multiplayer mode. GOW has often been held aloft as the epitome of dumb but fun gaming yet now, nearly a…

  • Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture (The Chinese Room, PS4)

    September 17, 2015 - By 

    I have a friend who, when he was a young boy, was fascinated by the idea of the apocalypse. He was not terrified or even mildly scared of the prospect of the end of the world. Rather, he was excited by it. Apparently, he had read The Day Of The Triffids several times and was genuinely beguiled by the notion of the wiping out of the entire human race because, and I am not making this up, he would be free to spend all day sitting on a mountain of crisps reading comic books and watching films, all the while…

  • Batman: Arkham Knight (Warner Bros., Multiformat)

    September 10, 2015 - By 

    There was once a time when Bruce Wayne’s ventures into videogames were the subject of derision and disappointment. For a long time, the Dark Knight only popped up in increasingly lacklustre beat-‘em-ups and movie cash-ins that absolutely squandered the licence. Yes, there was the occasional gem such as Ocean Software’s Batman, a quirky isometric adventure that gave DC’s greatest detective a pot belly and a cartoon scowl, or The Caped Crusader, a side-scrolling classic designed to resemble the flipping pages of a comic book, but they appeared on home computers way, way back in the late 1980s. What they lacked…

  • God Of War III Remastered (Sony, PS4)

    September 9, 2015 - By 

    If BuzzFeed ever compiles a list of the 27 angriest characters in videogames, the top spot would undoubtedly go to Kratos, the Ghost of Sparta and titular God of War. He’s angrier than Andross (Star Fox), Vaas (Far Cry 3), and Zangief (Street Fighter). He’s angrier than the birds in Angry Birds. He’s even angrier than Wreck-It Ralph. Kratos exists in a permanent state of rage, a mardy sourbake fixed to his big grey face as he fights his way up Mount Olympus, onwards, downwards and upwards to topple Zeus, the father who betrayed him, and all of his demigods…

  • Journey (Sony, PS4)

    August 18, 2015 - By 

    While the debate about home consoles and backwards compatibility rumbles on, the likes of Sony are steadily bringing out remastered, upscaled ports of recent classics. This can only be a good thing if it means that it brings more attention to bona fide masterpieces like Journey, a beautiful piece of design that defies easy-fit categorisation. It is not so much that there are insufficient words to describe this strange and haunting game. Rather, it is more that words will only cause the player to prejudge what they are getting when they download it, and that would be a sad thing because…

  • Rare Replay (Microsoft, Xbox One)

    August 14, 2015 - By 

    Back in the day, gamers had to wait five or six minutes for a game to load, the anticipation only slightly dampened by the horrific beeeeee tcchhh noise and the hypnotic parallax bars juddering up the sides of the screen. I am speaking specifically about the joys and woes of playing on a ZX Spectrum, for that was my platform of choice, a computer so hi-tech that it came with a whopping 48k of memory, later almost trebled to 128k. This little wonder was also linked up to a cassette player, which meant that anyone with a tape deck and…

  • Angry Birds 2 (Rovio Entertainment, iOS / Android)

    August 13, 2015 - By 

    One cannot help but be impressed by the Angry Birds phenomenon. There are few other apps that have been so downloaded to so many mobile devices and other platforms the world over. Quite the achievement for the once relatively unknown Finnish development house Rovio Entertainment, who has developed the initially wacky idea of a war between birds and pigs into an all-conquering, money-raking force of doom. The appeal of the Angry Birds franchise is easy to identify, as it takes no time at all for casual gamers to adapt to the simplest of concepts: knocking structures over by catapulting little…

  • Lego: Jurassic World (Warner Bros., Multiformat)

    June 23, 2015 - By 

    If you would be so kind, allow me a moment to unshackle myself from journalistic objectivity, break the fourth wall and relay to you a personal anecdote. Twenty-two years ago, I was staying with some relatives in Toronto, and my cousin announced in her languid Canadian drawl that she wanted to see the new Stephen Spielberg film: “Ya know, tha one aboot the dinosaurs eating folk.” I was easily sold, having been fascinated by the idea of palaeontology since I was a toddler, and so we made the forty-five minute drive along the freeway to the “nearest” multiplex, conveniently situated…

  • Mortal Kombat X (Warner Bros., Multiformat)

    June 19, 2015 - By 

    And so, we return once again to the age-old question: just how far is “too far”? Most scholars agree that one of the central tenets of art in all its forms is to be transgressive, to challenge tightly held mores and prejudices in order to push society, willing or not, in a healthier, freer direction. However, this drive towards progressiveness should always be counterbalanced by the caveat that upsetting the apple cart often leads to a lot of bruised apples. In less oblique terms, at what point does a piece of art stop being thought provoking and instead become merely…

  • Bloodborne (Sony, PS4)

    April 12, 2015 - By 

    Gluttons for punishment will find much to enjoy in Bloodborne, an unremittingly sadistic title that apparently has one difficulty level, and that level is brutal. Anyone familiar with From Software’s Dark Souls series will know the level of cruelty to expect here: a fearfully malicious and dark underworld where everything and everyone has the sole intent of annihilating you. None of this might sound particularly appealing but Bloodborne has the same compelling quality that infuses other equally addictive games. It proves your mettle, for sure, to be killed over and over and over again yet still want to keep coming…