The Star Wars license is not what it once was thanks to the new, divisive trilogy and the inconsistency of EA’s games. But Star Wars still has the power to tap into our collective nostalgia, and we’ve all just been waiting for EA to get their act together and start using the Star Wars license properly. Star Wars: Fallen Order was a pretty good step forward, and Star Wars: Battlefront 2 has grown into something far stronger than it began life as. But now Motive Studios and EA have come out with Star Wars; Squadrons, a space combat game where you pilot X-wings and TIE fighters, and live out all those childhood fantasies. Or at least, the childhood fantasies second to having an actual working lightsaber.
Category: Videogame Reviews
All the latest videogame reviews from me. Take that how you will.
Marvel’s Avengers Review – The Mehvengers
Just like the Hulk himself, Marvel’s Avengers is two very different personalities in the same body. The first is a single player game with a reasonable story and a handful of decent missions. It wouldn’t rival the likes of Marvel’s Spider-Man or the Batman: Arkham series, but it’s mindless fun. The second personality is a live-service game for groups of up to four players in the vein of Destiny with heavy monetization that intends on adding new characters and content over the coming years. Like the Hulk and Bruce Banner, these two personalities are almost always at odds, struggling to co-exist. But unlike the Hulk, Marvel’s Avengers isn’t big, green and awesome.
The Girl of Glass: A Summer Bird’s Tale Review – Genre Mashup
Take a lovely art style that wouldn’t look out of place in a book of children’s fairy-tales, combine with point and click adventuring, toss in some like turn-based combat and the result is The Girl of Glass: A Summer Bird’s Tale. On paper, those elements sounds like a fantastic mix. In reality, The Girl of Glass doesn’t manage to combine its ideas as well as they needed to be for it all to work smoothly.
art of rally Review – A Rally Good Indie Racer
Let me start this review by saying that I absolutely no idea what problem developer Funselektor has with the use of capital letters in the art of rally. And yes, the name of the game is art of rally, with no capitals. Nor, in fact, are capital letters ever used in this excellent arcade racer….
Bullets Per Minute Review – FPS: The Musical
Bullets Per Minute is what happens when somebody plays too much Guitar Hero and Beat Saber, and then decides to play DOOM at 3 am. It’s a first-person-shooter mixed with a rogue-like structure. Then, imagine the Doom: Eternal soundtrack but on a tighter budget. That solid thumping beat and tasty guitar riffs that make the foot tap and the head nod. It’s perfect music for a fast-paced FPS. But that killer soundtrack isn’t just pleasing to the ears, it’s the core of the entire damn game. Shooting, jumping, using abilities and reloading all have to be done in time with the beat. Pull the trigger out of rhythm and all you’ll get is a sad click. Time it right and the bang of the gun will become a part of the music. Once you get good at it, it’s really satisfying to hear everything you do mix into the music. Yup, Bullets Per Minute is an awesome concept.
Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning Review – Fated To Be Good?
THE year was 2012 and the world had not yet burst into flames. It was a simpler time. It was also the year one of my favourite RPGs came out, amidst a bunch of drama surrounding its development owing to the fact that Rhode Island had helped fund the game’s creation. 38 Studios was founded by former Baseball pitcher Curt Schilling with the aim of turning his gaming hobby into something more, and to create awesome new RPGs with the help of Todd McFarlane and R.A. Salvatore. He succeeded: Amalur is excellent, and in some alternate reality its sequels would have kicked ass. But despite solid sales of 1.2-million copies, too much money had been spent on development. Payments weren’t made on time, 38 Studios began to collapse. It would take near four years for the court case between Rhode Island, 38 Studios and Curt Schilling to be settled. So it’s something of a miracle that eight years later we have Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-reckoning, a remaster of the original game and a spark of hope that we might still yet get a sequel.
Iron Harvest Review – Company of Mechs
Iron Harvest certainly does a good job of making itself appealing to any RTS fan. Set in an alternative 1920’s, Iron Harvest mixes infantry with hulking diesel-powered mechs that stomp across the landscape. It’s all inspired by polish artist Jakub Rozalski’s 1920+ series of paintings, which also acted as inspiration for an excellent board game by the name of Scythe. The result is awesome to watch. As squads of gunmen slam into cover and open fire, a massive mech will power into the frame and begin unloading artillery rounds. Mechanically, these machines of war are not vastly different from regular tanks in how they behave, but they sure do look a hell of a lot cooler, don’t they?
Griefhelm Review – All Grief?
Griefhelm is what you get when you play Nidhoog and reckon there should be considerably more cutting off of limbs and decapitations. One man developing army Johnny Dale Lonack has put together this entire game on his own, a feat worthy of admiration. And I want to be clear on that, because the tough thing…
Ghost of Tsushima Review – An Honorable End
“Wake the fuck up Samurai, we have a city to burn.” Ah wait, that’s the wrong game. Despite not featuring the shining excellence of Keenu Reeves, being overshadowed by The Last of Us Part 2 and getting considerably less attention from Sony than Naughty Dog’s long-awaited disappointment, Ghost of Tsushima has ended up being a fantastic end to the Playstation 4’s long line of strong exclusive games. Ghost of Tsushima is selling great and breaking records, and it thoroughly deserves to. Marvel’s Spider-Man let us be the web-slinger. Red Dead Redemption 2 let us live our cowboy fantasies. Ghost of Tsushima lets us live with honor as Samurai.
Hellpoint Review – Space Souls
It’s weird to think that From Software have managed to create a whole new genre of action game, yet that’s exactly what they did with Demon’s Souls, Bloodborne and the Dark Souls trilogy. Hard as nails combat, exploration, baffling stories and a willingness to invest a lot of time are just so of the things that have come to define Souls-like titles. And there’s no shortage of games being released that have obviously been inspired by From Software. Today, I’m taking a look at one of them: Hellpoint, from Cradle Games.
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