As a huge fan of Amnesia, and Dear Esther, I looked forwards to Machine for Pigs greatly. The idea of fusing the brilliant narrative and storytelling of The Chinese Room, with the world building, and atmospheric terror of Frictional's games seemed like a match made in heaven, or maybe in hell. In th...

Unlike many others out there it seems, I'm a huge Dead Space fan who actually liked Dead Space 3, and was actually disappointed that it marked the end of the game series at the time. I'll happily admit that it lacks in some areas, most notably in that the enemies have become a little stale and repet...

I'll put this up front. I have never been a big fan of Kojima. While I admit he is one of the most inventive game leads living, and a genuine auteur. I cannot reconcile the amazing design and concepts of his games with the frankly terrible writing, plotting and character designs. Death Stranding is ...

I don't think tension is an inaccurate word here. There certainly were strong feelings at play and there was an undercurrent of disagreement that went beyond the usual "friendly bants" of most episodes. Ultimately, it's an emotive issue, and while I don't share Tom's utter disbelief at Ell...

Overwatch is, IMHO, a game where the only way to get a truly great experience, is to have a solid and dependable team of allies. I was lucky enough to get a free copy of Overwatch for participating in a pre-release event for a website. Immortalising my terrible performance at it for all time on a yo...

There's little to say about this game, that hasn't been said, other than, the Megadrive was my first console, and the first game I had on it, and it's always had a special place in my heart. I knew it inside out, I played it till I had SEGA thumb, and used to stand up while playing tricky parts and ...

Quake was a landmark game for me. Not only did it come out when I was at the impressionable age of 16, it was also the game that forced me to upgrade my PC that xmas, having stared at the shareware release's depressing message about needing a Floating Point Processor for months, I finally booted it ...

I'm finally playing Mass Effect: Andromeda. Not far into it. Having only just semi-completed clearing Eos, so very early days, but currently, I'm not seeing the "terrible game" that I'd have been led to believe this is. If this turns out to be one of those situations where people only disl...

They had seemingly just repainted Mass Effect 2 with a weird looking reimaging of DAO. Maybe, people could have seen that as a good thing? ME2 is an amazing game, even if, admittedly, I hadn't played the game, and wouldn't for a few years, but DAO wasn't trying to be like Mass Effect or ME2. Hating...

I didn't play Dragon Age 2 until some time after release, with Inquisition upon the horizon, and for the first third of the game, I was more than a little baffled by some of the choices. I did like the setting, although the choice to force your character into being Human initially seemed stifling, I...

What a strange little curiosity. I've literally just played Playdead's follow up to Limbo this morning, and it surprised me hugely. Not only because it takes most of the best aspects of their previous game, builds on them and adds in a far more sinister story, but also because despite being an impro...

I blasted my way through Prey many moons ago on the 360, and at the time I remember it being moderately impressive, although never wholly groundbreaking. But it did at least feel like a mish-mash of some of the better aspects of the then-current linear story fps shooters. As well as featuring the us...

Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag is the best AC game since Assassin's Creed 2. It's the high water mark (excuse the pun) of the series once 2 laid out the groundwork for how the games would progress, but took the wise decision to step away from a lot of the Assassin/Templar stuff and let the player j...

I'll say this up front, I've never been a fan of MGS. I've dabbled in Twin Snakes, and Sons of Liberty, but played a decent amount of MGS4. But in each case, despite some nice mechanics, the games never really worked for me and after a short while, I'd lose interest. Maybe it's the jarring clash of ...

It's not surprising that the minds behind Layers of Fear would again want to throw their hats into the psychological horror ring. But that they could so expertly turn their skills from that period gothic aesthetic to a stripped back urban futurist dystopia was a genuine joy. The game proudly wears i...

Superhot is that sort of viscerally immediate experience that's so simple you can't help but think, why didn't someone do it before? Graphically, it looks uncannily like a 3D remake Hotline Miami made on the engine of the 1993 Robocop 3 game on the Atari ST, but playing at a speed that would be unth...

Monkey island 2, was the very first point and Click game I ever played. I didn't have a PC back in the halcyon days of 1991, but my friend did, and over one very intense weekend, we played our way from the start to almost the end. Getting stuck finally when Guybrush fell down the hole and we couldn'...

Braid is an essential distillation of the medium of video games. Which probably sounds like ridiculous high praise, but there it is. I bought Braid within a week of release, having had it recommended to me by a games journalist friend who reviewed it, and loved it. They were right. I was blown away....

Being a huge fan of Frictional Games since the original Amnesia, I had been looking forwards to SOMA since the first teaser trailers hit the web. The use of live action in them really intrigued me, but on release my technology had failed me, and it's only this last month I finally got round to picki...

Similar to the above, I picked up The Room on Kindle Fire when it was free, and was cheered to see the Trilogywas going to be on Cane & Rinse. I'd always assumed the games would be a typical "room escape" puzzle, as I'd tried a few cheap and nasty similar games, but none had been more ...