Posts By Mat Growcott

The internet is full of Demon’s Soul experts. This is a game that, for 11 years, has built a dedicated and industrious following of people who want to know everything there is to know about this game. I am not one of them. I’m not running the game in 40 minutes, carefully researching what sticky white stuff to pick up and which to leave behind. I’m not counting frames so I can roll over that bloody annoying boulder in the…

How good can Tetris get? The definitive version on the Gameboy (or NES) did everything that this genre needed to do. Every effort since has just been more of the same. How much innovation can there be after billions of blocks? Turns out, you can squeeze quite a lot out of it. There’s been plenty to play on Xbox Series X this past week, but Tetris Effect: Connected has proven to be the most addictive. If you have Gamepass, there’s…

It’s time to enjoy two of the best co-op games ever made… again. Overcooked! All You Can Eat combines the first and second games together into a “remastered” pack on Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, but it feels a bit like warming up leftovers. If you’ve never played this series before and have somebody to play it with, disregard any negativity in the coming 900 or so words. They are fantastic fun and you’ll get an awful lot ...

How do you make a great racing game like Dirt 5 into a must-play experience? You optimise it for Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5. It’s that easy. Racing should be a bigger genre than it is. When you look at the mobile scene, the biggest titles are things that are intense, fun and playable in short bursts. That’s driving games to a tee. We haven’t been able to have that pleasure on console until now. The traditional experience has…

There was some chatter earlier this year that the jump this new generation will give us will be the biggest since the leap between 2D and 3D. Don’t just dismiss that as marketing talk, because it’s very true. Since the strongest 2d games were released for the SNES, we’ve seen a very slow transition to 3D. PS1 and PS2 were about finding the roots that would lead us to gaming as we know it today. PS3 was about building those…

There’s no better way of rounding out a dinner party than to load up Jackbox. The mini-game compilations are fantastic fun, often come to Gamepass, and, more amazing than anything, are now up to their seventh pack. This latest compilation brings with it five new games, each worth looking at. For what it is, there’s nothing quite like the Jackbox compilations, and I think if you know you’ll get the use out of it, it’s worth every penny. ...

It’s 2020 and that means aliens are going to invade about any second now. If those aliens are half as useful as the Pikmin, it’ll be a good day for our planet. The little blighters are happy to be tossed into walls, chucked at enemies, fed whatever yellowish goop happens to be lying around… On second thoughts, maybe this isn’t such a great idea. A better idea was Nintendo porting Pikmin 3 from the Wii U to the Switch. The…

Here we are on the cusp of a bonzer new generation of consoles, and I’m thrilled that Ty the Tasmanian Tiger is still here, biting it up with the big boys. Old games deserve to live on, and that’s doubly true when you’re talking outside the holy trinity of Mario, Sonic and Crash Bandicoot. Seeing those ripper levels again was a joy, but Ty HD is just that: those same familiar levels again. The resolution and framerate have been bumped,…

There was a whole article written in my head, and with each loss the adjectives were getting swearier. Rocket League had gone to the dogs. Was it because it was now free-to-play? Had the community just got bogged down by awful players and bad losers? It was sad to see such a great game in such a sorry state. The good news is that Rocket League is still amazing. The bad news is that players on Switch are getting a…

Whatever happened to the brawler genre? One day, every game was a brawler, and the next it was gone. It had become retro, with new content consigned to stylised sequels like the incredible Streets of Rage 4. 9 Monkeys of Shaolin is an attempt to bring those old titles back in something feeling a little fresher – and it mostly succeeds. But not just that. 9 Monkeys of Shaolin is a perfect combination of genre and theme, bringing back kung-fu…