Platform:Playstation Age Rating:16+ Year of Release:1949 Review:

This batshit crazy Japanese manga-esque RPG explore-and-destroyer has been a game that’s broken through into the mainstream of gaming, selling millions of units worldwide and spawning an -ahem – active fan subculture around its characters and stories. We’ll return to that later. A sequel to the 2010 game Nier, N:A is set in a post-apocalyptic earth in which humans have retreated to space stations in orbit and the earth is ruled by clanky robots. Humanity sends super-smooth androids to earth to support the scattered resistance fighters left behind, and this is where the story starts. And how different the gameplay is from modern games. There’s no autosaves. The game starts with a near-half-hour section of sideways scrolling 90s retro arcade action. Die during that and it is back to the start. Rock-hard boss battles, wave after wave of enemies, sudden shifts of camera position: one day son, all games were like this. You play 2B, a severe female droid at the start of the game who goes through the entire game with a blindfold on, dressed as a sexy teenage dominatrix. Your sidekick is a somewhat wimpy boydroid called 9S. Combat is mainly » Continue Reading.

Platform:Playstation Age Rating:16+ Year of Release:2017 Review:

In 22 Jump Street – possibly apart from Aliens and T2 the best ever sequel – Ice Cube greets the returning cops in his new office. Did they like it? It’s got a huge glass cube and loads of hot staff drinking espressos. Didn’t they know this is the sequel? Bigger budget baby.

Destiny’s budget was pretty big to begin with. Bungie – legendary developer of Halo – spent the GDP of a medium-size nation on bringing together the FPS and MMO. I think the verdict was pretty much that the MMO was pretty lame, while the FPS was the gaming equivalent of cocaine. Bits everyone liked included rock-hard team raids that took hours, as well as the usual multi-player options like capture the flag where you could be owned by a 12-year old from Bulgaria. It looked georgeous, but couldn’t escape a somewhat convuluted and tokenistic plot that didn’t really work hard enough to set up the bad guys as people you didn’t like, and the good guys as people you rooted for.

Now a mere six months after Destiny 2’s launch your erstwhile correspondent, AKA middle-aged gamer man, is about » Continue Reading.

Platform:C64 Age Rating:3+ Year of Release:1985 Review:

It’s hard to explain how flipping massive FGTH were in 1983-5 and how much they milked that cash cow. I still recall that ad in Record Collector listing the promo only FGTH vibrator (with ZTT branded ‘Power Of Love’ batteries) in their WANTS list for £200. We all recall the music but did anyone else play the gameon C64, Amstrad, Speccy or Amiga? **

It was wrapped up in all the pseudo intellectual bullshit that littered the sleeves of the Frankie singles – no doubt thanks to Maul Borely. You are a non person in dreary old suburban Mundanesville who has to gain a personality and therefore self discovery wandering through the houses, playing games, solving simple puzzles and spitting bullets at Ronald Reagan as a midi version of ‘Welcome To The Pleasuredome’ played endlessly by a wasp in a tin can.

There was something very dull about it but infectious too. A simple murder mystery caused clues to pop up every so often when you entered a room which meant the whole thing froze for about 10 seconds. The little sub games were the most interesting part whereas the Pleasuredome maze » Continue Reading.

Platform:Playstation Age Rating:18+ Year of Release:2016 Review:

As a thirty-year old unable to hold out against the original PlayStation hype, there were a bundle of three games I got with the console. The first was peerless RPG Final Fantasy VII, the second the rock-hard Resident Evil and the third was Doom. The PS version was a port of the original Doom and Doom II from the PC, and if FFVII was the game as a novel, as a source of beauty and emotion, then Doom was all about the thrill. From the sound of the shotgun to the superb level designs, ending in mad dashes for elevators before the timer ran out and the door slammed shut, it gripped us.

There was a previous reboot on the last gen consoles, but the current PS4 incarnation is seen as the inheritor of the original flame (of hell). So, thirty years on – how’s your FPS madelaine slipping down? I’m three levels in, and playing on the easiest setting – daughter is of course dismissive, as only the harder settings introduce the lack-of-save points jeopardy of the original. Spent 90 minutes fighting to the end of the level only to die » Continue Reading.

Platform:Playstation Age Rating:7+ Year of Release:2016 Review:

A small portion of the Internet has been on fire over the past couple of months, and only now are the flames dying down so we can see what’s lost and what’s been saved. Seldom has a new game received so much pre-release hype as No Man’s Sky, and seldom has a game received so much abuse on its release.

For those who are going No Man’s what here’s a brief recap. Tiny indie games studio Hello debut footage of a space-opera exploration game promising a near-infinite universe to explore with ‘ten quintillion’ planets. The footage – pure Chris Foss 70s cover paintings made digital Magic – and the proposition of being able to explore fully realised alien worlds no-one has seen before, makes the gaming world explode. Sony give the game the full 110% build up and for two years it’s the most anticipated game in development. In the weeks leading up to the delayed release word starts to spread that the game’s initial release may not contain all the features discussed during development.

So on release Reddit becomes the home of a hate-fest populated by videos of angry gamers comparing the » Continue Reading.

Platform:Playstation Age Rating:18+ Year of Release:2015 Review:

Before us gamers all lose weeks of our lives trailing round the galaxy discovering new planets and naming them Asscrackius here’s a look at a very different ‘open world’ game. No Man’s Sky has rather redrawn the map of what constitutes an open world: making the miles of open country in MGSV with missions dotted around in it look not so open. Nothing is procedurally generated here, everything has been placed with care and attention to detail by one of gaming’s auteurs, Hideo Kojima. Rather than an indie upstart, Metal Gear is gaming royalty. I’ve been onboard since MGS for the original PlayStation and count it as one of the three games, along with Doom and Final Fantasy VII, that sucked me into console gaming. MGS3 and MGS4 I also loved, though failed to finish the latter and thus missed the hour-long cut scene that concludes it. All are characterised by a labyrinthine plot worthy of Games of Thrones involving special forces, Cold War double-crossing, secret cloning and genetic engineering programmes, and shadow armies involved in vast decades-long conspiracies.

MGS, if not originating, has perfected the ‘sneak-em-up’ genre in which it’s possible » Continue Reading.

Platform:Playstation Age Rating:16+ Year of Release:2014 Review:

Many buzz words around current console games centre on freedom: huge open worlds in which you can get into and drive any car, scale any wall, pick up anything to use as a weapon, open every door and so on. The forthcoming No Man’s Sky offers an entire universe to sandbox around in. Metal Gear, Fallout, Grand Theft Auto and so on all pride themselves on offering this sense of the player as a free agent, able to negotiate their own way through the game. Well Sniper Elite is not like that, it’s a tightly focused and strictly linear experience.

The Sniper Elite series have so far been set in WW2 – 1 and 2 (essentially the same game confusingly) being set in Berlin at the end of the war, SE3 set in North Africa during the desert campaign. You play the titular sniper Karl, an American OSS operative. Each of the eight large levels in the SE3 campaign sees you infiltrate a base/airfield/factory/camp etc as you complete a series of objectives leading to the goal of stopping a Nazi super weapons programme.

So, let’s be clear the story is more Wolfenstein than » Continue Reading.