If you liked Limbo, you'll like Inside. It's a natural progression, but with huge changes in style, pace and puzzle types, so it's never anything less than totally fresh and exciting. But what if you didn't play Limbo or didn't like it? Inside is a sideways scrolling puzzle game, featuring a young boy who appears at the start, with no plot divulged; the plot unveils as you progress. Whilst motion is restricted to 2D, the world is very much 3D, with the camera panning continuously as you move...

Fire Emblem Awakening was the make-or-break point for Intelligent Systems' fantasy strategy series. The two games on the DS (one of which never reached western shores) failed to captivate the public, so Nintendo would pull the plug from the series if the next game wouldn't reach a certain sale threshold. Awakening was a smash hit, one of the most feature-rich games in the series, with a customisable player avatar, children, skills, and a class tree more complex than ever.
Fire Emblem Fates...

After two massive entries in the series where Intelligent System crammed in as many old and new features as they could, the fifteenth Fire Emblem scales it back to a more bare bones experience. Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows Of Valentia is a remake of Fire Emblem Gaiden. Originally published on the Nintendo Famicom in 1992, itself a spin-off of the original Fire Emblem. This remake not only updates the technical side, but adds several features, including five new characters, skills for special wea...

The Switch is quickly becoming the platform of choice for many Indie developers. Nintendo have clearly caught on to the fact that the bedroom coder is making a comeback, and with growing cynicism surrounding many AAA releases and their funding models, Indie developers have begun to pick up the slack with a dazzling amount of titles appearing across major platforms. Human Fall Flat is developed by No Breaks Games and released back in 2016 for the PC. Its success meant the team has joined other indie...

Sega have been guilty of multiple cases of mismanagement over the years regarding the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. From releasing clearly-unfinished games with Sonic the Hedgehog 2006 to farming out their prized asset to a third party developer with Sonic Boom, Sega have made some pretty questionable decisions over the years. This time, Sega are guilty of extremely poor timing. Not only is Sonic Forces releasing in the wake of a certain Italian plumber's Nintendo Switch debut, the game is being...

It’s difficult to imagine the thought process behind the design of the PlayStation Vita when development began in earnest in 2011. Nintendo’s DS range of consoles was an unexpected success against the mighty PlayStation brand, yet Sony still managed to carve out a sizeable market for themselves by positioning the PlayStation Portable an explicitly gamer-orientated handheld, rejecting ‘gimmicks’ such as the DS’s touchscreen in favour of replicating traditional console experiences. The brief...

Let’s face it. Rally games on the Xbox 360 / Xbox One generation have been lacking. The initial Dirt series was fun, and excelled at what it did (constant drifting), but as far as real rally stage racing goes, the stages were too short. The WRC games had a go, but most people would never get beyond trying the demo. Now at the start of 2016, there is the prospect of 2 new contenders. Dirt Rally has already proven itself on the PC, but at the time of writing, we don’t yet know if the console port...

At the time of writing, Codemasters’ Dirt Rally is only available on the PC as an Early Access via Steam, but let’s hope it comes to consoles too, because it’s one of the best driving games released in a long time. There are a few niggles still to be worked out, and features to be implemented, but the majority of the Single Player game is complete and it's already at the point that it's so worth forking out the money. Essential even. If you want Multi Player, you'll have to wait though. EDIT:...

2014 was a big year for Godzilla fans. Not only did it see the release of the long awaited second American installment in the series, confirmation of a sequel and a new Toho produced film being in production, it also gave us a new PS3 game. So how did it end up – one for the Godzilla die-hards, or able to be enjoyed by all? Godzilla games over the years have tended to fall into one of two camps – destructive, destroy everything in sight affairs - like that which launched alongside the Dreamca...

Everyone loves Nazis right (well apart from your Nan, who was probably bombed by them, but I digress)? In videogames I mean. The go-to bad guys who instinctively raise the hackles of people, none more so than the average gamer who is almost trained to point a weapon at their heads. For a time they were ubiquitous in gaming, but most recently have been replaced by anyone vaguely Middle Eastern in appearance as the bad guy of recent times. But Machine Games looks to bring us back to blowing away vast...