Posts By Mat Growcott

Everybody’s favourite bird/robot combination has returned to Overwatch – but Bastion is not as you remember him. The famously tough little robot can no longer heal, and his high damage gun is now a temporary move. In some ways this feels like a nerf – especially when you’re surrounding by Tracers and Sombras – but in others it opens him up as a very different charcacter. If the unfortunately missing Assault was still in the mix ...

Resident Evil Re:Verse still exists and, well, that’s news to me. The multiplayer game, which has been delayed twice, will be free to owners of Village from October 28th. The multiplayer mode for Village was met with skepticism when it was announced nearly two years ago. That was only increased when it was delayed from May 7 – alongside Village – to Summer, and then again to a vague 2022. Well, surprise surprise, it’s still coming in ...

Game Pass has always been great, but it’s got to the point where it’s now also impossible to keep up with. This is a fantastic problem to have. For an average adult with broad tastes, Game Pass has now tipped the scales from very cool to overwhelming. And with a mountain of first-party content expected in the first half of next year, that’s a problem that’s going to remain with us for months to come. This thought occurred to me…

I’ve been known to get a bit grumpy about the neverending talk about Silent Hill and its inevitable return. Well buckle in, folks, because now it’s been officially announced. I’ll do a quick rundown of the announcements shortly. But first, let’s look back at all the happy months and years insiders have been promising this moment will come. We couldn’t have got here without them. And don’t forget to take a moment’s ...

How do you review Overwatch 2? Honestly, I’ve been wondering ever since I downloaded it. Is it fair to give a high score to a sequel that isn’t in any way a sequel, but just the same game in disguise? Is it fair to mark up excellent gameplay when the free-to-play system beneath it feels so dirty? More than that – this isn’t my first visit to Overwatch. I have a few hundred hours into it, and there are benefits…

VR was going to be the next big thing, but it has never happened. Cost became prohibitive, “must-have” software is limited. And with the announcement of the Meta Quest Pro, it seems the best is becoming increasingly out of reach. This is not good. This tech isn’t cheap, and the Quest Pro is not aimed at your average gamer. But it’s not a good look for an area of the industry that has been on the edge of greatness for…

It’s one of the most requested remasters today – and yet The Simpson’s Hit & Run remains mysteriously absent from the modern gaming scene. Playing it for the first time in almost 15 years reveals why. It must be, at least partly, because of Apu. Yes, PS2 achievements are here, and The Simpsons Hit & Run was one of the first games I booted up to revisit. In many ways it stands up. Hit & Run was the children’s alternative…

New free-to-play games must put their best foot forward to compete with the big boys. Overwatch 2 is simply not doing that. A good friend of mine is a huge Blizzard fan, but had managed to miss Overwatch. He is exactly the target audience for a free-to-play re-release. Remove the barrier of entry and he had downloaded it within minutes. And yet his experience so far has been so poor as to put him off completely. When he is in…

Bruce Willis has sold his body to a deep fake company, and that means we’ll be getting more quality Die Hard sequels long after he is dead. His “digital twin” as they cynically call the process will be able to perform in films, adverts and probably much else for decades to come. And that is going to be a very tempting offer for video game companies. Imagine, if you will, a catalogue of stars living and dead that you can…

Stadia is dead. Google will refund the cost of hardware, games and DLC, and by January 18th the service will be completely wound down. I know what you’re thinking: wasn’t it already closed down? And that is the tragedy of Stadia. Because it wasn’t a bad idea. Like OnLive wasn’t a bad idea, or PlayStation Now. But they held such a strange position in the industry that they would never be able to find success. Why play something via the…