Posts By Mat Growcott

Death Stranding 2 has a photo mode that will influence the way the story plays out. It also has in-game concerts. The attention to detail is incredible. But come on Kojima, I have a life. Games are getting too damn big. I’ve been playing Final Fantasy VII Rebirth since March. It’s one of the best games of the generation and I don’t see that changing. But its need to completely dominate my free time is frustrating. I’ve enjoyed every ...

You don’t need an insider knowledge to know Overwatch has been mismanaged. It’s still nice to know it for definite. Jason Schreier’s new book on Blizzard goes into some detail on the inner workings of Overwatch. He shared a shorter version on Reddit. The further abridged version is that the team behind making Overwatch such a success were cautious in hiring new people in case it changed their company culture. They tried to feed the original ...

The panic is over. Horizon Zero Dawn is going to be re-released with shinier graphics. At seven years old, it was getting pretty dicey. It would be all too easy to be snarky about this one, and I wouldn’t be alone. Although there are people defending it – and why shouldn’t they? – I’m not alone in finding this release to be both bizarre and unnecessary. Even more so than The Last of Us Part 1. Horizon still plays as…

Square Enix announced is financials this morning and the outlook isn’t so hot. HD Games – including Final Fantasies XIV and 7 Rebirth – underperformed to the tune of ¥8.1 billion ($57m). This is terrible news for a franchise which has finally found its footing. Those two Final Fantasy games are the best the franchise has been in years. Rebirth, although I’m biased, will likely be this generation’s Red Dead Redemption for me. A ...

The PlayStation 5 Pro was officially announced. It’ll allow you to have fidelity graphics at 60fps. And it’s a… er… steal at $700. And if you think that’s bad, wait until the PlayStation 6 gets announced. The new pro console boasts the ability to play your games with higher quality visuals while retaining the 60fps. Three quarters of people are choosing performance modes over fidelity. I will save the obvious observation that ...

Astrobot is an inoffensive, entertaining little platformer that has been entertaining fans and critics since it released last week. So the discussion around cameos might be a little surprising. Like its predecessor, the free-on-PS5 Astrobot’s Playroom, Astrobot contains a whole load of cute cameos. PlayStation characters in all shapes and sizes return in their dozens. Unlike Playroom, which came out at the start of the generation, today’s cameos ...

Just a few hours after I wrote that Concord wasn’t dead yet, Sony killed it. I guess that’s a lesson to us all. You can no longer buy it. Servers will be shut off tomorrow. After eight years of development, the game lasted about a fortnight. Its director said that it will be back after the development team “explore options, including those that will better reach our players”. If you heard “free-to-play model” then you ...

Within hours of release, PlayStation’s Concord was labelled a failure of the highest magnitude. Analysts have suggested sales could be sitting at around 25,000 on console. Steam sales are behind that. And man, people are loving it. Endless analysis from people without the information needed to give it and, huh, surprise of surprises, the analysis all points to exactly what their opinion on the situation is. Sony is focussing too much on GAAS, and this is ...

Once upon a time, retro collections were rapidly thrown together catalogues of old games. These were roms, and other than a menu connecting them together, nothing else had changed. Gone are the days. Capcom has another Fighting Collection on the way. A Tetris set is in the works too. This is awesome news. And I’m especially aware of it, because I’m working through the incredible Sonic Origins collection right now. First, Fighting Collection 2. Any ...

Ask social media for a list of the most important games Xbox ever put out and Indiana Jones probably isn’t even in the top twenty. And yet Indy is whipping way above his weight. I don’t want to put undue pressure on this game. It’s looking like it’ll be a great time, and the developers are saying all the right things. This isn’t a “Starfield is Xbox’s last chance” situation.  That boat has sailed and is long over ...

Game Pass is getting restructured. First party games are leaving PlayStation Plus, and there’s no evidence they’re coming back. The grand experiment is over, and it looks like the glory days are gone. It was supposed to be a shake up on an industry that desperately needed shaking up. The traditional model of paying increasingly high amounts for increasingly safe and padded out video games was starting to feel hard to justify. Many of us were paying ...

People are talking about Final Fantasy XIII again. A vaguely worded Square Enix post on Twitter has fans discussing the possibility of a remake. But is it a trilogy that even needs a major revisit? XIII was an important game to me, for a variety of reasons some too personal to get into. But it was the first Final Fantasy game I’d covered as press. I was surprised people were so vehemently against it at the time, and especially because…

Red Dead Redemption never officially came to PC. So it’s unusual that the PlayStation Store is currently announcing that it will be making the jump. Yes, you read that right. The PS4 version of Red Dead Redemption was given PC-centric copy for a while there on the store. I just wish I could say that it wasn’t a moment too late. It would be hypocritical of me to grumble too much about the original PS3 classic getting a release on…

There’s been a lot of talk lately about where the industry goes from here. It’s is in a bad place. Games that are too big to fail are failing. Releases are becoming fewer, and developers are playing it absolutely safe. And yet the answer is right under our noses: Fortnite. Now, I can’t say that I love this future. But every so often the topic of Fortnite will come up amongst myself and colleagues and although it’s not our cup…

Avowed has been delayed into 2025 to give it room within a chockablock run of Xbox releases later this year. Which would be all good and well… but what releases are we talking about? Take out the PC-style strategy games, Call of Duty (which will be everywhere), DLC and AA games and you’re left with Indiana Jones. Which I’m not going to knock for a second, but if that’s your main release for the entire year, then something has gone…