Posts By Mat Growcott

There’s only one thing you can say for certain about the current mobile phone gaming market: the stores are pretty locked in. It’s Google Play or it’s Apple’s App Store. Microsoft’s plans for a third alternative is going to have an uphill struggle. This has slowly been coming out over the course of the company’s purchase of Activision. One of the big reasons for the purchase – on top of Call of Duty and hundreds of ...

Starfield will be coming out on September 6. That is a little bit disappointing. Not because there aren’t other great Xbox games on the horizon, I should hasten to add. There are. Between Game Pass and Xbox’s first-party releases, I can barely keep up as it is, without adding a giant Bethesda-sized RPG into the mix as well. And not because I have any issue with a delay in principal. Get Starfield where it needs to be before you hit…

Resident Evil 4 got a very sudden demo this morning – and that means we had a very sudden download to get going. It was well worth it. Resident Evil 4 put this franchise on the map. The PS1 games sold relatively well. 4 outsold them all and, to this day, nearly all of them put together. It was super successful. That was in part due to the films. And so while the remakes of 1 and 2 had a…

When Suicide Squad was shown at the Sony direct, it received mixed reaction. I filed it under “play in a sub service” and didn’t think about it again. Apparently that wasn’t enough for some people. According to Bloomberg, the game has ended up being delayed. This follows backlash from fans. Despite that, it will still likely hit this year. So don’t expect it to suddenly become Arkham City 2. I wrote the other day about how ...

One of the big releases of this week has been Wo Long, the Soulslike set within the Three Kingdoms period of China. I’ve not played it much, but I’ve enjoyed what I’ve seen. And the most amazing thing? I was in on the ground floor. In all the talk about subscription services, it tends to be the value that comes up the most. People will get really excited about the prospect of getting something for (seemingly) nothing, especially if that…

The Outer Worlds is getting a paid update, and it’s a hard sell. Take a game that’s more than three years old and polish it up a bit, and then charge for it all over again. How can you justify that? Well, the justification is that people have had to work on it, and that is hard to argue with. People have absolutely had to work on it. How much? We don’t know. I guess it changes from game to…

There was a time when Suicide Squad and in particular Harley Quinn were huge. And that coincided with a time when superhero GAAS titles were soaked in potential. That time is decidedly not now. I don’t have strong opinions on the showing of Rocksteady’s new Suicide Squad. It debuted to mixed reaction at this week’s PlayStation State of Play, and while I won’t be rushing out to buy it, decent reviews make it a must-play at some point. ...

In the last few weeks, we’ve seen a very quick raft of releases of old games for new consoles, and not a single one has released without some issue, big or small. Just think about that for a second. Goldeneye, Tales of Symphonia. Hell, even the Blade Runner release from last year is still being fixed (which is admirable, but plays into my point here). There is clearly a demand for old games. There are entire communities of retro fans…

Metal Gear Revengeance is ten years old today. The last great (full) Metal Gear game is a decade old. How depressing is that? After Metal Gear Solid 4, it was unclear where the franchise would go. Backwards seemed the easy answer – Big Boss’s adventures started to stretch and stretch. But the character action game following Raiden’s next adventure was an unexpected pleasure, and it gave a hint at what the world looked like following the ...

PlayStation VR2 releases this week, and reviews are fantastic. Unsurprisingly, if you’re already sold on VR and have a PlayStation 5, you’re not going to be disappointed by VR on PlayStation 5. But this is the latest VR device to hit stores, and it’s yet another test of just how this area of the industry is going to go. It’s one thing to have PCVR, it’s another entirely for it to hit the mainstream through consoles. I say ...