Kena: Bridge of Spirits is the first game that developer Ember Lab has made, but you wouldn’t be able to tell that from looking at it nor could you tell by playing. It doesn’t do anything dazzling or revolutionary in terms of actual gameplay, but it’s a solid throwback to the structures of games from...
Superheroes from space descend on Santa Destroy in No More Heroes III, the long-awaited sequel to the action game series from Grasshopper Manufacture and its founder, Goichi “Suda51” Suda. Again, the game puts the players in control of Travis Touchdown, the otaku assassin who twice climbed to the top of the United Assassins Association rankings....
The Ascent’s got plenty of exciting building blocks propping up its foundation. It’s a twin-stick shooter set in a sprawling cyberpunk landscape with promises of hordes of loot for players to acquire from chests, missions, and the remains of their inventories. Too often, however, the game’s more frustrating moments get in the way of the...
In today’s gaming landscape, there’s no shortage of love letters to classic console RPGs. From indie titles to triple-A projects like Bravely Default II, games of all sizes try to recapture the magic of sitting down in front of a CRT screen with a SNES controller to embark on an epic adventure. While these efforts...
Dynasty Warriors might be Koei Tecmo and Omega Force’s flagship action franchise, but through the years we have gotten to see different variations of the central 1 vs. 1,000 formula with not only anime and video game franchises like One Piece, Mobile Suit Gundam, and The Legend of Zelda, but with its own spinoff franchises...
Narrative can be a powerful tool when allowed to flourish, and Armature Studios took that to heart with its latest release Where the Heart Leads, a game that captures moments in time, the grander picture of how lives intertwine, and how the trajectory of those lives can be shifted by the smallest of decisions. We’ve...
In 2016, Capcom released Monster Hunter Stories on Nintendo 3DS, a JRPG using elements from the publisher’s Monster Hunter franchise. Five years later, Capcom has delivered a sequel on PC and Nintendo Switch. While the two games take place in the same world and feature some connective tissue, Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin...
In 1999, Square Enix (then still Squaresoft) released Legend of Mana, the first spinoff of the Mana series (known as Seiken Densetsu in Japan) line of games. At the time, it was a strange beast. It’s a two-dimensional RPG released for the original PlayStation when Sony was pushing polygons hard. Despite having series creator Koichi...
For the first significant time, Dungeons & Dragons will be officially crossing over into Magic: The Gathering with the release of the Adventures in the Forgotten Realms set in July. The crossover has largely, up to this point, gone the other way, with a couple of Magic: The Gathering‘s locales receiving their own D&D settings....
The Mario Golf series has a proud history on Nintendo consoles, dating back to the days of the Nintendo 64. Mario Golf: Super Rush on Nintendo Switch continues in that tradition, bringing in a number of new elements as well as returning options from across the series. The result just might be the definitive Mario...
