Reviews

Tourist Bus Simulator

Turns out console bus simulators really are like buses – two have turned up at once. Whereas last month’s Bus Driver Simulator Countryside was a clapped-out banger, Tourist Bus Simulator offers a smooth and easy-going ride. It’s a PS5/Xbox Series only release powered by Unreal Engine 4, allowing...
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6

Evil Dead: The Game

2015’s Evolve may have died a tragic death, largely at the hand of publisher 2K, yet its spirit lives on. It so transpires that the asymmetrical multiplayer structure is ideally suited to movie licenses – especially those with villains known for brute force. Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy is...
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7

Behind Closed Doors: A Developer’s Tale

It’s Monday morning and Ethan is reluctant to go to work. With his first child due any day, he doesn’t have much of a choice. Being a game developer may sound like an easy living, but with emails from irate gamers to answer – in addition to hurriedly...
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3

Trek to Yomi

The greatest compliment I can give Trek to Yomi is that it looks and feels as if it came from a Japanese development studio. In reality, it was developed by Polish outfit Flying Wild Hog, best known for the Shadow Warrior series. It’s so respectful of the country’s...
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7

Dandy & Randy DX

If you rented games back in the day, chances are there’s one you hired multiple times. For me, it was Capcom’s Goof Troop for the SNES. It played quite differently from other Disney games, using a top-down perspective, and it featured a jaunty musical score. It was reasonably...
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7

Ravenous Devils

Out of curiosity alone, I recently purchased Cooking Mama Cookstar. The controversy surrounding it made me interested to see how the final product fared – it isn’t every day a big-name release is yanked from the eShop. Turns out it was harmless, if a little soulless. Now, another...
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7

Big Bang Pro Wrestling

For all the talk (and there’s a lot of it) present in Pro Wrestling, sometimes, what you actually want is to pick up a dude and slam him repeatedly on a tightly stretched canvas until you can pin him for three seconds. There’s a gladiatorial purity to the...
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8

Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion

If you’re in charge of the weekly shop, you may have come across boxes of wonky veg – oddly proportioned vegetables that supermarkets once snobbishly shunned. Presumably, it was believed that the vegetable buying public wouldn’t want to eat crooked carrots and peculiar-looking parsnips. The cast of this...
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7

HUNDRED FIRES: The rising of red star

What’s the difference between so-bad-it’s-good and just plain bad? When do bad voice acting, bad translation, and weird capitalisation choices stop becoming a mistake and start becoming an aesthetic? Hundred Fires brought those questions to mind very quickly. Set in ‘60s Cuba, you play as Valero Montenegro, a...
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2

Metal Tales: Overkill

Heavy metal and video games go together well. From the synth-guitar riffs of Thunder Force IV, through Rock ‘n’ Roll Racing’s licensed SNES replicas of some classic bangers, to the mighty DOOM’s “D_E1M1” (oh, okay, At Doom’s Gate, if you insist) itself, the genre has been the sonic...
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5

Taito Milestones

One of my favourite films is 1962’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. It’s about a young working-class boy sent to a borstal, and his relationship with the governor there, who befriends him and invites him to be on the long-distance running team. It’s a great film,...
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5

Bus Driver Simulator Countryside (Switch)

Games entailing buses, trains, and farming have been big business for a while now, and I totally get the appeal. They represent an appeal to our inner child. A way to relive the joys of toy cars and those rugs that had pictures of roads on them. A...
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2