An entertaining yarn that manages to mash up some Lovecraftian lore with the general plot of the original game is the backdrop to a decent survival horror title that leans far more towards puzzle solving and exploration over combat and, in the current gaming climate, that gives it a more unique feel.

I also liked the 'creepy, but not scary' vibe. It's more Are You Afraid Of The Dark than The Exorcist, relying on atmosphere over jump scares and gore for the most part. Again, although not necessarily something I'd want every horror game to do, it makes Alone In The Dark feel quite fresh.

Combat is serviceable at best and definitely the game's weakest suite and the story, although absolutely interesting, gets a little lost in its own sauce towards the end and this stops Alone In The Dark from being absolutely essential but if you're a fan of the original or would like a modern survival horror game that has the sensibilities of those 90s PC/PS1 titles, I think you'll find a fair bit you'll enjoy with this one.

Some great ideas realised fully and some great ideas that don't quite land, but a game full of great ideas nonetheless. A game that requires you to meet it on its own terms and it won't surprise me to find out that a lot of people simply can't do that - hell, I bounced off it hard upon its original release and only just got around to pushing through to the end of it.

If you can, you'll find a game that manages to feel truly unique due to the way it forces you to accept consequence and make concrete choices or by the way you can try to circumnavigate these to get your desired outcome. Just be prepared for a bit of a slog during the first half of the adventure whilst you get a true foothold in the world.

Also - that is SOME final act, isn't it?

An at times inexplicably complex series of switch hunts and I fucking love it.

Personally think a lot of the heat this game gets is parrotted from retro YouTubers who expected medieval Doom and got this slow, exploration-based and melee-heavy FPS. I enjoy having to explore every nook and cranny. I think the whole 'critical path is occasionally hidden behind secret walls' is overblown because the handful that are necessary are really bloody obvious. The only real criticism I think holds water is that the first hub is not only the worst, but also the most complex and least well explained, so in terms of putting it's best foot forward, Hexen stumbles out of the blocks AND pisses all over itself.

Good atmosphere, a nice sense of IMPACT to all the melee hits and some really cool tricks performed by the Doom engine put the polish on what I think is a bit of a strangely maligned title.

Woke up this morning with a unshakable sense that I had some unfinished business with something so I went and completed this for the first time in my life.

With limited use of save states (at the cauldron, basically), infinite lives and a walkthrough it was still a bit of a slog, having to go back and forth across the map several times throughout a playthrough, but is just about an enjoyable genesis of the Dizzy formula. Without those things, it is just a pure pain in the arse, requiring even more backtracking across the map to make sure you get the items that take out the randomly moving enemies that kill you in one hit.

Title screen music alone almost bumps it up an extra star, mind.

God, what an enjoyable little platformer!

Everything you want from a classic platform game - loads of stuff to collect, hundreds of secrets to find, plenty of enemies to kill and some really devious levels that manage to do that great thing where the first time you attempt them they'll take like ten minutes and once you know your way around them you'll be able to blast through them in a a tenth of that time. Just all the real best shit, right there.

Played on Evercade with the new widescreen and 60FPS support, which smooth out (literally) a few of the rough edges that some people have complained about in some of the other reviews on this site, so I absolutely recommend this version if it is available to you.

I can't believe I'm going to say this but I wish this was a walking sim. The vibes are absolutely impeccable but Remedy's combat is really unsatisfying, enemy design lacking the creativity of the setting they inhabit and encounter design varied so wildly in terms of quality. Like, this is a game which features such incredible enemies like "flying barrel" and "flying tyre" and, of course, how could we forget "vibrating gate"?

Now, this wouldn't be a problem if the game offered more but all you really do is walk around a bit and shoot at these enemies - it's the primary way you interact with the game and it isn't very good. There's barely anything I'd call a puzzle and exploration is little more than "go the other way instead of the critical path". Honestly, I cannot believe the people who made the shooting in Max Payne had anything to do with this.

Remedy please just focus on the bits you do better than almost everyone else in the AAA space and leave the shooting and that to others. I love the worlds you build and want to spend time in them, but if you can't make the things I can do in them particularly compelling, I think I'd rather just have a wander around and little else.

A weird one for me, personally. I reviewed it for GamesRadar and I stand by everything I said in that - Street Fighter 6 is a remarkable fighting game and one of the best overall out-of-the-box packages seen in the genre to date. It's a 5/5, a game that offers instant fighting game fun and seemingly endless depth if you decide to get 'into it'.

I did decide to get into it. I've played Street Fighter games to a solid standard since SFIII, never been a top player but aspiring to improve and play to the best possible standard I can, consuming endless tournament footage as it became more and more freely available and playing in local offline events since SFIV dropped. I'm INTO this stuff. Since release, as the meta of the game has slowly started to take shape, watching and playing the game has left me feeling a bit cold. It's still exceptional when I play my pals or go to an event but grinding ranked or watching the top players hasn't grabbed me in the way previous titles have, mainly because I'm not hugely into how the core mechanics affect the game. I don't think they're bad (in fact, I think the Drive System is genius) it just doesn't fondle my bollocks as much as I need it to, so to speak.

Lucky for me, they patch these games once a year and I can almost guarantee you there will be some significant changes to this stuff and it might end up changing into something that I play every day for the rest of my life, such is Street Fighter.

An exceptional fighting game, no doubt.

Starfield is a game that caused a LOT of people to show their arse. From simple randos on Twitter who like PlayStation or Xbox a little too much to reviewers at almost every outlet online to those really fucking weird aggregator accounts that post all the review scores when a game comes out and definitely need their hard drive checked - arses were shown. Everyone picked a side. Starfield was either Microsoft's big 2023 exclusive that would knock the spots off everything else on the market OR it was an absolute affront to God - one of the worst games ever made.

The reason people lost their heads is because it was neither. It offered them no additional ammunition in their embarrassing console war shenanigans. Starfield was merely fine. It was the tried-and-tested (and million selling, of course) Bethesda RPG formula, only in space, with a few extra, new things bolted onto it of varying quality.

That's all it was ever going to be. That's all it needed to be. There's nothing wrong with merely being an okay videogame, unless you're looking for a reason for that to be an issue. It's FINE. Unless you wanted it to be the best/worst game ever.

I've said a lot of really positive things about Teyon's Terminator: Resistance over the past few years and all of those positives have been improved upon in RoboCop: Rogue City. A game that sets out to capture the look, feel, sound... every single element of RoboCop and the horrible retro-future Detroit he patrols and does all of that to a near perfect degree. You're not just some rando made up to fit the storyline this time around though, you're the actual, factual RoboCop. The big man himself.

Once again, the spectre of budgetary restraints lingers over a few elements of the actual mechanical videogame stuff but they all seem so inconsequential when you're grabbing a perp off his motorcycle, flinging him into the air and popping his head with a volley of bullets from the Auto-9, the whole while the iconic RoboCop theme blares away in the background.

I love how it doesn't shy away from all aspects of RoboCop - even the absolutely shite ones - and does them all justice. The satirical edge, ultraviolence and underlying sadness from the original movie, the edgelord comic book vibe from RoboCop 2 and some daft, almost wholesome missions that are straight out of the Prime Directives or RoboCop 3, only not a total steaming dog egg, of course. It's easy to forget that RoboCop went from borderline video nasty to Saturday morning kid's TV in around five years, but Teyon didn't. They wouldn't. They GET it.

It looks like this game did really well and I think these guys deserve a AAA sized wad of cash thrown at whatever they've got planned next. It's the only thing stopping holding them back.

I first played The Getaway when I lived in deepest, darkest Oxfordshire and, although I enjoyed it, found the city you drive around to be lacking any character when compared to the PS2's trilogy of GTA titles. However, coming back to it after living in London for near fifteen years, it's a fascinating time capsule, with all the textures taken from real photos of real streets I have walked down, creating this sensation of extreme familiarity as I pass places I know, places I've been and a whole load of now bankrupt and long since closed shops. It's obviously not a 1:1 recreation but it is JUST enough to evoke a feeling that this is the real London. I imagine getting clearance for all the local bossman's chicken shops wasn't something they bothered with, mind.

There's some incredible, forward-thinking ideas and some absolutely baffling decisions that bash heads throughout, making for a game that is hard to recommend in 2023 but one thing is clear: The Getaway is a game full of ambition and that has to be applauded.

If you can see past some of its flaws, you'll be charmed by its strengths. Much like London itself.

A game that lays so much of the groundwork for the rest of the Metal Gear series that if you're approaching it after playing Metal Gear Solid it practically feels like a 'demake' of that title. Takes all of the impressive stuff from the original game and adds loads of new ideas - all things that are eventually used again throughout the Metal Gear Solid games - and begins to really find that sweet spot for Metal Gear storytelling. You know, the one that lands directly between the utterly absurd and the deadly serious commentary on war. I remember during the pre-MGS release hype a few magazines running statements from Kojima saying that 'MGS was the technology finally allowing him to deliver the Metal Gear game he always wanted to' and I remember finding how close to MGS Metal Gear 2 actually is when I first played through it but on this recent replay, I think this is a game that holds up remarkably well 33 years on.

I can't quite get my head around the fact that this game was doing all this in a world before Sonic The fuckin' Hedgehog existed.