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I like a game that chucks me into the thick of it with minimal preamble: Just beat me up! I’ll learn! Klei’s new co-op brawler is one of those: You can handwave the NPC welcoming committee who tries to explain the controls and just start swinging a hammer at forest monsters within seconds. My kind […]

Need to Know What is it? A soulslike/platformer hybrid starring a hermit crab.Release date April 25, 2024Expect to pay TBADeveloper Aggro CrabPublisher Aggro CrabReviewed on Gigabyte G5 laptopSteam Deck PlayableLink Official site  The most fun I’ve had with a soulslike since Elden Ring. The less self-serious take on the genre I wanted Lies of P […]

What year is it? Because I’m sure Sand Land (and the Akira Toriyama-authored anime and manga it’s based on) just came out, but this action RPG, complete with numbers popping out of enemies whenever feisty lordling fiend Prince Beelzebub hits them, feels like a return to the bad old days of licensed games. The sort […]

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is one of my favourite games from 2023—and it also received our pick for best adventure last year. It’s leaps and bounds above Fallen Order, offering a really solid space romp that blends Sekiro-adjacent soulslike combat with a heavier lean into action-adventure. That makes it even more of a shame that […]

After a year of exclusivity on the Epic Games Store, the zombie survival game Dead Island 2 is now available on Steam—and not everyone is as excited about its arrival as you might expect. Dead Island 2 didn’t knock our socks off when it debuted in 2023, thanks to “dull design choices, repetitive combat, and […]

The Konami code is one of those Easter eggs that has long since travelled outside of its origins. It first appeared in the seminal shooter Gradius in 1986, but came to prominence in the west thanks to the NES release of Contra (it is sometimes called “the Contra code”), and basically gives the players bonuses […]

Need to know What is it? A metroidvania based on African folklore. Expect to pay £18/$20 Release date April 23, 2024 Developer Surgent Studios Publisher EA Reviewed on RTX 2070, i7-10750H, 16GB RAM Steam Deck Verified Link Official site Mythologies often paint the Sun and the Moon as complementary opposites, two sides of an enormous […]

A prologue-style demo for an upcoming action platformer has you wielding a magic staff and two-fisted kung fu to battle enemies and explore a metroidvania-style world of myth and magic. Akatori‘s big pitch si that your way of moving depends on a magic staff that can be thrown not just as a weapon, but to […]

In a joint IGN interview with NieR creator Yoko Taro and Stellar Blade creative director Hyung-tae Kim, the two developers had nothing but praise for each other’s work, while the famously eccentric Taro insisted that his surreal and existentialist fever dream NieR: Automata was just an Evangelion rip off that played to the market. While […]

Indie developer Dapper Dog Digital released their “love letter to the Metroidvania genre” this week with BioGun, a platforming action-adventure that takes place entirely inside a whimsically microscopic world of viruses and vaccines. And whimsically enjoyable it is, with a hand-drawn world and characters that have a wide, delightful, and cartoonish variety in their design. […]

Let’s get this out of the way now: No Rest for the Wicked is absolutely not an action RPG in the style of Diablo. There is loot to find, yes, but it doesn’t transform you into an untouchable god. No, Rest for the Wicked is a lot closer to a soulslike with its weighty, punishing […]

Surprise! Hades 2 is finally here and playable. Supergiant’s hack-and-slash, flirt-with-gods roguelike is a brief technical test away from its Steam early access debut. I’ve slashed my way through its opening area and first boss and now I need more. Even though it’s clearly in an unfinished state, it’s good. Like, really good. A small […]

Take Assassin’s Creed. Subtract a few Templars. Add a handful of Mongol soldiers. Plus a haiku riff or three. And what you’ll have is Ghost of Tsushima. Formerly a PlayStation-only title, it’s coming to the PC on May 16. And now we have the full system requirements. Happily, they’re not too scary. That’s despite the […]

I’m an old man and I don’t understand anything anymore. Time was, you’d get your Xbox games on your Xbox, your PlayStation games on your PlayStation, and on the rare occasion someone thought to port those games to PC they wouldn’t work. It was a simple system and it made sense. But look at us […]

Hades 2 is set to launch into early access later this year, but if you don’t want to wait that long to see what’s cooking you can sign up to get a taste of it sooner in the upcoming technical test, which was announced today on Steam. The Hades 2 technical test will be limited […]

Star Wars Outlaws prompted a collective sigh last week when it was revealed that the single player, open world adventure will have a season pass in addition to the nowadays common “play the game early” incentive attached to pricey special editions. For an extra $40 with the Gold Edition—for a total of $110—the season pass […]

In the late 1990s, following the success of Tomb Raider and Perfect Dark, a developer called Bits Studios set to work carving itself a slice of the “third-person action-puzzler starring an attractive polygonal lady” pie. Nintendo were all set to publish the game, which was called Riqa, and even showed it off at E3 in […]

In a welcome bit of feel good industry news, Blasphemous level designer Enrique Colinet revealed on Twitter that Larian Studios was one of the game’s biggest backers on Kickstarter, and that the studio never made a big deal of it or asked for the backer rewards such a contribution would entail. “Not many people know […]

In a welcome bit of feel good industry news, Blasphemous level designer Enrique Colinet revealed on Twitter that Larian Studios was one of the game’s biggest backers on Kickstarter, and that the studio never made a big deal of it or asked for the backer rewards such a contribution would entail. “Not many people know […]

The Triple-I Initiative‘s debut showcase had a lot of great games lined up. Personally, I’m psyched out of my gourd for Slay the Spire 2, but I’m also eyeing up Rogue Prince of Persia, an unexpected announcement that’s wall-running right up my alley. Silksong fans, however, are none too pleased. Some context: Silksong, the successor […]

I was a little surprised to learn that Ubisoft is publishing a second 2D Prince of Persia game so soon after The Lost Crown, meaning both were in development simultaneously. This one is a bit different though: It’s not developed by a Ubisoft studio, and it’s releasing on Steam in early access this May, which […]

We had a lot of positive things to say about the immersive sim Shadows of Doubt since its (sadly no-longer-available) demo arrived in early 2023, much of it comparing the game to Deus Ex—which, in case it’s not clear, is very high praise indeed. Its voxel-based world grows bigger today with the release of the […]

I have to hand it to the developers of Kill Knight for their choice of title: How can I not want to know more about an arcade shooter called Kill Knight? It is, as you’d hope and expect, about a knight who kills. It’s fast, violent, and coated in red, not unlike Doom Eternal. Developer […]

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 might be seven years old, but it’s still getting free content updates. There’s that long-awaited versus mode, of course, though that’s still in testing—in the meantime, says Fatshark, here’s a free map and a new enemy type, because why not? A Parting of the Waves makes to round out the Karak Azgaraz […]

EA Motive studio director Patrick Klaus has written about what’s going on at the studio in an update post that touches on both the studio’s upcoming Iron Man game and the wider situation with the Battlefield series. What we already know about the Iron Man game is what you’d expect. EA calls it a “third-person, […]

Sonic co-creator Yuji Naka has had something of a varied career since leaving Sega, initially focusing on his own company Prope before teaming up with Square Enix to direct the ill-fated Balan Wonderworld. The latter wasn’t a great game, and ever since release Naka and the publisher have been engaged in something of a moral […]