Crying Suns – PC Review
Crying Suns is the latest in a long and storied lineage of tactical space-age rogue-lites. But while other games of its ilk are mired in complexity, it embodies their best features, forgoing their worst. The same could be said of the game’s narrative and tone, which proudly borrow from some Continue Reading
Worldbuilding Showcase – Total War: Warhammer
The environment of a game is absolutely crucial, even in a strategy title such as Total War. It may not seem it, but every gaming experience relies on the quality of its backdrop. Without it, nothing would have context, and there’d be nothing worth fighting for. After all, characters and Continue Reading
The Blight of Shonen Fighters
Unsurprisingly, there’s an immense crossover of fandoms between video games and shonen anime. The two are alike in many ways, being cartoonish but earnest parodies of real life. They’re beloved for their gratuitous violence, over the top characters, and untold capacity for societal introspection. If you ever want to experience Continue Reading
The Card Games Problem
There are a select number of games that fit industry monetization perfectly. Whether through some ominous prophetic wisdom or simply through sheer miserable coincidence, they’re structured perfectly to accommodate greed. From the inherently milkable longevity of MMOs to the potential for cosmetic peacocking in every single death-cam shooter. But perhaps Continue Reading
Top 5 Video Game Depictions of Robotics
If there’s one thing media has never been shy of warning us away from, it’s the dangers of robotics. From Terminator to Wall-E, robots are associated with the cessation of human life as we know it. Video-games are no exception to this, with robots primarily ruling wastelands and ruined worlds. Continue Reading
Borderlands 3 – What We Want to See
Gearbox as a developer has a legacy of peaks and troughs. For every wildly successful series like Borderlands, there’s an utter disaster like Aliens: Colonial Marines. For every unfortunately treated gem like Battleborn, there’s an abomination like Duke Nukem Forever. But no matter how far they fall out of favour, Continue Reading
Freeroam Games Deserve Better
For every raging success in the games industry, there’s always a talented but underappreciated doppelganger. To first-person shooters like Call of Duty, there were ingenious third-person shooters like Half-life and Bioshock. To massive MOBAs like DotA 2 and League of Legends, there were the RTS games that spawned them. And Continue Reading
The Word ‘Pack’ Needs to Die a Painful Death
Back before the dark ages, there was a time when character and weapon skins were built into a game. An age where the gaudiest assets in any character’s arsenal were available for no extra charge. Unfortunately, that history is long since passed. Nowadays, the most interesting items a game has Continue Reading
The Joy of Grinding
All throughout games, you can find examples of grinding and repetitive gameplay. Performing the same tasks over and over, for eventual rewards. It’s an aspect of gameplay that MMOs are almost entirely constructed around, to occupy players for often thousands of hours. However, it’s also an aspect of games that’s Continue Reading
Do Narratives Really Matter – Stealth
Stealth is one of many genres that tend to serve as an accomplice to another, more developed one. It can accompany shooters, horror, platformers, puzzlers, simulators, anything that can justify the need to hide. This means that pure stealth games are few and far between, and vary wildly in quality. Continue Reading
