For the unfamiliar, brick-breaking games kinda do what it says on the tin – you’re in control of a paddle, which you use to bounce a ball against bricks until they break. A bit like one-player ping pong. But that’s where the similarity ends as they’re a lot more fun than Forrest Gump’s favourite Olympic sport.
Now that I’ve visited Bewlay, and delved deep into Hob’s Barrow (not a euphemism), I have access to another world in which robust vernacular is firmly on the menu.
They cycle through creepy woods, battle inter-dimensional horrors and navigate shady government facilities, all while dealing with burgeoning hormonal urges and hair where there was no hair before.
But Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge was a laser-guided missile of early 90s bliss aimed right at my heart, and I was powerless to resist.
On paper Sifu is simple. It's a third person brawler that has you fight your way through five levels, kill five bosses and avenge your slain family.
It turns out that no prior knowledge of Rifftrax is required, as Wide Right Games have created a fantastic and often hilarious party game that is accessible to all, and this is a game I highly recommend whenever you have friends or family around.
Initially, upon seeing a few screenshots – and thus the anime-styled character portraits, combined with blocks of dialogue– I foolishly assumed that it was a visual novel and my expectations dropped accordingly…until I watched the trailer.
A little history: The Forgotten City started out life as one of Skyrim’s many mods, and it was successful. So successful in fact that the developers took the idea, built upon it, and fleshed it out into the standalone game I’m reviewing today, creating a gloriously designed Greco-Roman city, replete with fantastically written characters, period-accurate architecture, and a central gameplay mechanic that is simultaneously clever, fun, and educational (yeah, I know – they don’t go together often).
I went into The Forgotten City completely blind, and I would recommend that you do the same. It’s hard to review a game like this one without some kind of spoilers, so if you’d like to get the absolute most out of it, stop reading after this statement: The Forgotten City is 8-10 hours of adventure mystery romp, driven by fantastically written and acted dialogue. Play it.
Yes, you heard right, a bird of the Corvus family, commonly known as a crow.
Crash Drive 3 does not have this problem. It's an open-world, cross-platform arcade stuntfest where you tear about in a huge array of vehicles in amusingly varied environments. And it's fun.
I wasn’t sceptical so much as squinting into the distance, trying to visualise what that mash up would look like.
It looks like Intrepid Izzy, as it turns out.
Making decisions is probably my favourite thing to do in terms of mechanics, I love it. Having to contemplate things like morality, ethics and predicting outcomes are things I enjoy in other media as well as life in general, so I was very excited for Where the Heart Leads.
Over the last decade, I have transitioned from PC gaming to pretty much pure console gaming, and so almost a decade of the work of Amanita Design has completely passed me by due to their PC exclusive nature. It was only whilst half-drunk one night - and trying to buy the Machinarium soundtrack on vinyl - that I discovered that they had released a game called Creaks that was available on Xbox…and so our love affair resumed.
