PlayStation

With 2019 halfway over, there have been many hits and misses in the video game market. From dazzlers like Resident Evil 2 to the confusing yet somewhat enjoyable mobile game Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, gamers have experienced a lot. And that’s just the first half of 2019. There’s a bunch more content coming out in

Dark Souls has a lot to answer for. Since From Software’s cult RPG classic launched back in 2011, it’s spawned a legion of imitators. There have been straight Soulslikes (Lords of the Fallen, The Surge), 2D Soulslikes (Salt and Sanctuary, Hollow Knight) and even roguelike Soulslikes (Dead Cells). It’s not unreasonable to say that Dark

The great debate in video games for a while was as follows: should we pursue linear level-based design or open our games out and make them sandboxes? Both design approaches have their advantages. Linear games are more focused and allow for tighter, more controlled design. Open-world games have more potential for “watercooler moments”, those funny

For many, Japanese RPGs represent an impenetrable phenomenon. There are, of course, plenty of accessible entry points into this most idiosyncratic of game styles, but many are put off by the very genre conventions others adore. JRPG opponents decry the occasionally wobbly dialogue and sometimes samey tropes these games employ. Proponents of the genre love

2019 is shaping up to be a pretty darn good year for gaming. We’ve had triumphs like Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and Devil May Cry 5 already, and it’s not hard to feel like the best is yet to come. Here are the 15 most exciting games arriving in 2019. Rage 2 (PC, PS4, Xbox

BioWare’s history as a developer is an interesting one. Although the company is perhaps best known for its narrative-driven RPGs and character building, their first game, Shattered Steel, was a MechWarrior-style mech combat sim published by Fallout overseers Interplay. The game was released in 1996, and was a fairly straight-laced mech game with some interesting

Superheroes, we are told, do not exist in real life. Our caped crusaders and brooding vigilantes live only on the page, coming to life during fancy dress parties and briefly when movies are made of their exploits. People who do extraordinary things in the pursuit of saving someone else’s life are often called heroes, but

It’s been said that the point at which humanity reached a state of civilisation was the point when we stopped simply surviving and started living. Survival is, of course, still necessary; we still eat, sleep, drink and do all the things we need to in order to keep living. It’s fair to say, though, that

Consider, if you will, the strange and wonderful world of racing simulation games. From Codemasters’ F1 series to Slightly Mad Studios’ Project CARS, the art of driving cars really fast around increasingly dangerous tracks has been represented in as many ways, shapes and forms as it’s possible to imagine. If you’re a gearhead and you

When we were younger, the prospect of playing “augmented” video games was something that belonged exclusively to the distant future. Peripherals like the Sega Dreamcast’s VMU (Visual Memory Unit) and the original PS1’s PocketStation gave us a glimpse into what playing games with secondary displays might feel like, and in 2012 Nintendo’s Wii U showed

“Take me home, country roads/To the place I belong/West Virginia, mountain mama/Take me home, country roads”. So go the lyrics to John Denver’s famous “Take Me Home, Country Roads”, a song that Bethesda has been working very hard indeed to attach to its online survival RPG Fallout 76. This song is already something of a

When a particular game does what it does so well that it becomes a runaway financial and critical success, pretenders are bound to appear. For every Dark Souls, there’s a Lords of the Fallen. For every Sonic the Hedgehog or Super Mario Bros, there’s a Bubsy. For every Spider-Man 2, there’s a Prototype. Sometimes, these