Fallout 4

Posted 12:47pm Sunday 17th April 2016 by Lisa Blakie

Rating: A- Bethesda Studios game director and executive producer Todd Howard recently received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Game Developer’s Choice Awards for his incredible contribution to open world gameplay and the gaming industry as a whole. Bethesda is extremely well known for Read more...

Undertale

Posted 12:13pm Sunday 10th April 2016 by Lisa Blakie

Rating: A+ Within gaming circles, there is an ongoing debate about what it is that makes games important and unique among other forms of media. With reference to gameplay, these arguments usually focus on the dissonance between a game’s ludic elements (the ‘game’ part of the Read more...

Superhot

Posted 1:18pm Sunday 3rd April 2016 by Campbell Calverley

Rating: B Superhot has got style. If you were to take the minimalistic washed-out aesthetic of Mirror’s Edge, turn all of the enemies into red glass, and add a pinch of the time manipulation from Braid, then you would get something resembling Superhot. It is less than three hours long, but Read more...

Firewatch

Posted 1:55pm Sunday 20th March 2016 by James Tregonning

Here’s a quick history of popular video games. It starts with the arcade, with players putting quarters into machines over and over, beating high scores and paying for the privilege. These arcade games developed out into what is now arguably the largest entertainment industry in the world. For Read more...

Dead of Winter

Posted 2:48pm Sunday 13th March 2016 by Campbell Calverley

The theme is the most overlooked aspect of any board game. When all of the game’s events, actions and individual components come together as parts of a cohesive whole, your response to the game as a player is similar to that of the characters you are playing as. Theming is hard to attain and Read more...

Bloodborne: The Old Hunters

Posted 2:17pm Sunday 6th March 2016 by Campbell Calverley

Rating: A+ Bloodbourne was released in March of 2015, and I realised that it was the best game that I would play for a long time. Its bloody Gothic aesthetic and notorious difficulty made it both an excellent action-adventure game and a scary survival horror game. The Kafkaesque plot involves a Read more...

The Beginners Guide

Posted 1:27pm Sunday 28th February 2016 by Campbell Calverley

Rating: 4/5 Far from being a digital introductory handbook for any new students, The Beginner’s Guide is hard to describe. That is not surprising, given that it is from the creators of the excellent Stanley Parable, a sadomasochistic journey into unreliable narration. The Beginner’s Read more...

Big Pharma

Posted 2:58pm Sunday 4th October 2015 by Carl Dingwall

Rating: 4/5 In an industry where saving people can make you a tidy profit, there have been many accusations of putting money before people’s lives. The Big Pharma conspiracy has always been a scary idea, and it isn’t helped by recent examples of corporations hiking up prices of Read more...

DeadCore

Posted 1:35pm Sunday 27th September 2015 by Campbell Calverley

Rating: 5/5 The first-person platformer is a very unstable genre. First person makes it disorienting — you can’t see your feet and the camera is often shaking. Games like Portal and Mirror’s Edge are examples of such first-person platforming where experimentation has paid off Read more...

Tales from the Borderlands

Posted 2:05pm Sunday 20th September 2015 by Brandon Johnstone

Rating: 5/5 A Telltale Games masterpiece has almost become a cliché. Tackling some of pop culture’s largest franchises, from Back to the Future to The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones, Telltale Games crafts surprisingly captivating stories while avoiding covering old ground or Read more...