Category: Reviews

Razer BlackWidow V4 Pro Mechanical Keyboard Review – Pricey but Brilliant

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Razer’s approach to designing the Blackwidow V4 Pro was to throw everything at it, a fitting plan for anything with the word ‘Pro’ in its name. It’s a mechanical keyboard that dominates your desk thanks to it being slightly larger than a regular full-sized board and being adorned with enough lights to confuse a UFO into thinking it’s a friend. It’s peppered with macro keys, has great mechanical switches and comes with a super comfy wrist rest. But all the bells and whistles equal a hefty price of around £230, which makes my bank card quiver in fear and my heart skip a beat or ten.

Company of Heroes 3 Review – We’ll Fight Them on our Turn!

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Once a bastion of the RTS genre thanks to massive successes like Dawn of War and the original Company of Heroes, Relic has crumbled in recent years, their sterling reputation now resembling a building hammered by a mortar barrage. So after ten years without a sequel, bringing back Company of Heroes is their chance to show the world that Relic still has what it takes to deliver an awesome RTS experience. And do you know what? They come close. Company of Heroes 3 is very good at times. It’s also in need of some work.

Pharaoh: A New Era Review

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The 90s and early 2000s saw the rise of Impressions Games thanks to their various city-builders like Caeser and Zeus. But the most famous of them came in 1999 when they launched Pharaoh, a city builder set in Egypt where you had to build expansive cities and construct vast monuments because what every desert needs is a big triangle. The game often makes it onto lists of the best city builders and many have tried to replicate it. Now, developer Triskell and publisher Dotemu are here with a remake that aims to bring the charm and fun of Pharaoh to a new generation. Let’s go and raid the t

Pronty (Switch) Review – A Charming, Fun Metroidvania Game

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Water levels don’t exactly have a stellar reputation in video games. They’re notoriously hard to get right and have consistently appeared in lists of the worst levels ever or in rants on Reddit. But for some insane reason, the developers of Pronty decided to set the entire thing in the depths of the ocean, and somehow they’ve made it work. Pronty is an amalgamation of many modern Metroidvania games, not doing anything new as such but executing it all with verve. Although it was first released back in 2021, it has made the long swim upriver to the Nintendo Switch, giving me the perfect opportunity to dive in.

Hogwarts Legacy Review – Worthy of the House Cup?

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Like many people, my connection to Harry Potter began with the books. Born in 1991, I was only 6 when the first book was released but I still had a copy. It’d be a few years until I began to even vaguely understand most of it, but I was a precocious little bastard who loved to read ahead of my years despite it all going over my head. Anyway, over the years I read the books like crazy, and then I got into the movies on Christmas eve when my parents gave me a copy of The Philosopher’s Stone on VHS because they thought it would be nice to relax on Christmas Eve with a movie. I’m telling you this so you understand that I’m most certainly coming into this review with a least a little bit of bias toward the franchise. Both the books and movies are ingrained in my childhood and even my adult life. While I wouldn’t consider myself a fanboy, I still re-read the books and re-watch the movies every few years. Hogwarts Legacy, then, was an exciting prospect from the very start. While we’ve had good Harry Potter games over the years, the best modern titles have come from the LEGO franchise. It’s baffling because the world J.K. Rowling conjured up seems to be perfect fodder for games. And finally, like magic, it seems that Avalanche has got it right: Hogwarts Legacy is pretty d

Deliver Us Mars Review

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Deliver Us Mars is the sequel to Deliver Us The Moon: Fortuna, a narrative-driven game that had a lot of issues when it launched at the end of 2018. KeokeN Interactive removed the game from sale and worked hard to patch it up, including a reworked ending, before releasing it again minus the Fortuna subtitle. Then, last year, they released a PS5 and Xbox Series patch, bringing it back into the public eye. Now, KeokeN Interactive are back with a follow-up and although you can enjoy the story without having played the original, the cast of characters is largely the same, carrying on the story of the Johanson family. This time the focus is on Kathy Johanson, the youngest of the family who has spent years training to become an astronaut. Her story is an interesting one marred by monotonous gameplay. Although KeokeN Interactive’s passion and love for its game are undeniable, and it has certainly launched in a better state than its debut in 2018, Deliver Us Mars doesn’t always deliver the goods.

Power Chord Review – Misses A Few Notes

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A rogue-lite deck builder built around battling demons and heavy metal music. Running down that checklist, it seems Big Blue Bubble was trying to make something just for me. It’s an appealing mix and I’m always down for some tasty riffs that make the ears bleed and the soul plead for more. After spending a dozen hours in Power Chord battling demons, collecting cards and hoping that this run was going to come together, I came to the conclusion that Power Chord is the rock debut album of a heavy metal band with potential, but hasn’t managed to put any real depth into their music.

Marvel’s Midnight Suns Review – Marvel’s Poker

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Of all the things I imagined Firaxis doing, mostly involving getting on with XCOM 3, there was never a point where I considered them getting their hands on the Marvel license and making a turn-based tactics game involving the Midnight Suns, cards and attending a weekly book club meeting with Blade where you end up discussing a Kree book outlining their military doctrine. And yet here we are. Firaxis has taken their genius and attempted something interesting and a little weird, mixing a bunch of ideas into a chunky 40+ hour adventure. Like a long-running comic’s canon, Marvel’s Midnight Suns is…complicated.

Razer Basilisk V3 Review – Feature Packed & Comfy Mouse

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The mouse market is a confusing place filled with equally confusing terminology and numbers. There’s so much choice out there, from established brands to a myriad of newcomers offering insanely light mice designed for people who have sacrificed thousands of hours upon the altars of competitive multiplayer. So when I went hunting to replace my Logitech G403 I was greeted with so many choices that my brain immediately displayed a 404 error and refused to do anything for a few hours. After a lot of searching, I settled on one of Razer’s latest mice, the Basilisk V3, their updated version of a mouse I actually reviewed back in 2017. Three revisions later, how is it holding up?

New Horizon aircraft and vehicles attack a Black List outpost in the campaign of Crossfire: Legion on PC

Crossfire: Legion Review – A Forgettable RTS

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The Crossfire franchise was something of a mystery to me, a name that has been around since the early 2000’s and boasts of being the biggest FPS in the world. Yet, like me, you probably haven’t even heard of it. In 2020 the free-to-play shooter laid claim to a whopping 6 million active players, with most of those being in Asia, and has grossed over $ 10 billion. Over the past few years, there’s been an effort to push Crossfire into Western markets, as well as turn into a multi-genre franchise. So, with my limited knowledge of what Crossfire is, I decided to check out Crossfire: Legion, an RTS developed by Canadian studio Blackbird Interactive.