Neon Tail Review | A Rollerskating Indie Adventure Game
4 years ago, I interviewed Feili from Rocket Juice Games, who was working on an open-world adventure RPG game which was set to stand out in one key way: Your sole means of transport is rollerskating! I love the idea of checking back on projects I've done interviews on. Feili and his very small team have now taken Neon Tail out of early access, with plenty more updates set to come and I was excited to see if their hard work had paid off!
Star Ocean: The Divine Force is Everything Wrong With JRPGs | In-Depth Critique
Can't help but feel disappointed by modern JRPGs? Let's review and take a closer look at Star Ocean: The Divine Force and what it has gotten wrong. Is this Square Enix game worthy of the PS5?
I Didn't Think Tomb Raider Games Could Get Worse! 😂 | Tomb Raider Reloaded Review
I've been blocked by game director Brian Horton and the official Tomb Raider twitter page. Do they think that will stop this review of the latest (hopefully last) of the awful Tomb Raider games that Square Enix has published? Tomb Raider Reloaded, it's terrible, obviously.
Action Man: Mission Extreme | PS1 Review
Metal Gear Solid fans might want to check this game out for better or worse. Action Man: Mission Extreme (also known as Operation Extreme) takes a lot of inspiration from the hit PS1 game and in this review I'll show you how. The game, based on the popular action figure, came out in the late 90s just a year after MGS1!
ECHO Review | Can This Stealth Game Learn From How You Play?!
ECHO is an indie stealth game that touts a unique AI system that can learn from what you do and how you play. In this review, I reveal if that claim is too good to be true and whether ECHO can serve as inspiration for AI innovations moving forward.
Is King's Field II Better Than The Original? | From Software's Second Game
The sequel to the Japanese exclusive King's Field, the first RPG on the Playstation & From Software's first game is said to be better in many ways. Hold on a second, let's take a look in this review of King's Field II.
Does Amnesia Rebirth Live Up To The Original? | Spoiler Free Review
Another Retro Perspective review on Amnesia Rebirth. Does it live up to the original Dark Descent? I tried to keep this review as spoiler free as possible it was a bit off the cuff so it's not the longer critique that I've been keeping to recently but I felt the game at least needed a look. Especially in the Halloween season when people are looking for the best horror games to play!
Did Silent Hill Downpour Fail the Fans? | In Depth Critique For Halloween
Since the release of the Western developed Silent Hill games, fans did feel that Konami failed in delivering a horror game that lives up to the series terrifyingly well-conceived roots. In this review & in depth critique of Downpour on PS3, we will discover where Silent Hill went wrong.
Boot Hill Heroes | Review
Boot Hill Heroes is the first game from indie studio Experimental Gamer, a developer which aims to bring elements from classic RPGs such as Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger and breathe life into the genre once again. This very small team had a successful kickstarter campaign in late 2012 and Boot Hill Heroes was released on Steam and XBox Live Arcade in October and December of 2014 respectively. It originally caught my eye because of its striking resemblance to Earthbound and I thought it would be the perfect game to play in the run up to the release of Mother 4.
Rugrats Search For Reptar | PS1 | Review
In a list of games I played over and over again as a kid, Rugrats: Search For Reptar would be up there near the top. Let’s see if this PS1 game from 1998 stands the test of time. Surprisingly this was the first game based on Nickelodeon’s Rugrats cartoon that started in 1991, featuring Tommy Pickles, Chucky, Phil, Lil and Angelica as playable characters across a series of surprisingly varied levels.
King's Field Review | PS1
King's Field is a Japanese exclusive PS1 game by From Software that released in 1994, shortly after the launch of the console. In this King's Field review I wanted to go back to a style I tried when I first started The Retro Perspective. A more detailed, broken down look at the individual elements that make this game what it is.
Star Ocean 4: The Last Hope | Review | PS3
In 2010, the proper version of Star Ocean 4 was released on the PlayStation 3. It contained both English and Japanese voice-over, a choice of 2 UI styles and an extended soundtrack that was included in the Japanese version, and all on 1 disc instead of a ludicrous 3, which needed to be changed when travelling to different planets. It was also bloody awesome.
Future Cop: LAPD | Review | PS1 perfection!
EA Redwood Shores would later change its name to Visceral, the team behind the beautifully scary Dead Space. They created possibly the best sports game of all time in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 and one of the best racing games on the PS1 with NASCAR Rumble. But even before that, with their very first game, they absolutely nailed it with what is undoubtedly my favourite PS1 game and that game is Future Cop: LAPD.
Time and Eternity | Review | PS3
Have you fallen out of love with Japanese RPGs lately as I have? Often we have to return to the golden age of JRPG’s to remind ourselves how good the genre can be but a surprising amount of these games flew under the radar during the Playstation 3’s lifetime. I will definitely be talking about Folklore some other time, but for now, it’s Time And Eternity, a game which puts you in the shoes of a newlywed princess Toki whose perverted husband gets assassinated immediately after saying I do. Luckily the princess has the ability to reverse time to the months leading up to the wedding and with the help of her pet dragon and the soul of another woman, Towa, who also inhabits her body, tries to uncover the mystery behind the attack on her wedding in the hopes they can prevent it….did I mention this game is Japanese?
Toy Commander | Review | Dreamcast
You’d be hard-pressed to find people with any kind of childhood that didn’t at some point arrange their toys in such a way to form some sort of city or contraption, guiding miniature figures through & imagining crazy stories & scenarios in their kid brain. I know I certainly went through a phase of driving toy cars along the carpet, up the wall, down bannisters...on the ceiling if I could reach it. So when I first played a demo for Toy Commander on the Dreamcast back in 1999, I was struck by how the game captured that essence of childhood imagination so perfectly and that short snippet of the game stuck with me ever since.
Kingdom Hearts 3 | Review | PS4
In my last Kingdom Hearts video it would be an understatement to say that I was pessimistic. Square Enix’s insistence on releasing games in the series so frequently on every platform imaginable, with massively fluctuating quality in aesthetic and gameplay terms, has left the series in the unfortunate position of having more bad games than good. But I thought I’d give Kingdom Hearts one last chance, knowing all along that if Kingdom Hearts 3 went the way of Final Fantasy XV (a buggy, ugly, unfinished train wreck) I could safely say I would never buy another Square Enix game again. Ever. So unlike a lot of commentators I’ve noticed on social media who outright bum every nonsensical story trailer or screenshot of one of Tetsuya Nomura’s ludicrous cast of Final Fantasy rejects, you can rest assured I’m about to give this game exactly what it deserves.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider | Review | PC
Well, Rise of the Tomb Raider was awful but what do we have here, Shadow of the Tomb Raider is developed by Eidos Montreal, the studio that brought us the excellent Deus Ex: Human Revolution & Mankind Divided. Surely they played Rise of the Tomb Raider, laughed their arses off at its ludicrously easy combat difficulty, its barely developed characters & its complete lack of meaningful improvement over the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot, & simply proceeded to make their own Tomb Raider game...but then Square Enix stopped them & said “No! That will cost too much money.”
Soulcalibur VI | A Return To Form For The Series?!
Soulcalibur VI might be a glimmer of hope for the series for fans who felt let down by the lack of content in the previous two games. Here's my (almost) review as I definitely wanted to get my thoughts out on this game.
How Half Life 2 Set The Bar for All Video Games
The original Half Life & its sequel Half Life 2 were ground breaking games in many ways. In this review we discuss how in some ways Valve's FPS series has never really been topped by modern games & many video games still struggle to design fun gameplay scenarios as well as Half Life did years ago.
Two Point Hospital | Review
1997’s Theme Hospital is undoubtedly a classic in every sense of the word & it has never really seen a true successor but with the release of Two Point Hospital by a team consisting of some of the original developers of Theme Hospital, we could finally see a hospital simulation game that moves past some of the limitations of the 90s or even reaches the full potential of this unique idea. Two Point Studio’s Mark Webley & Gary Carr have seemingly been biding their time for many years, knowing full well that a spiritual successor to Theme Hospital would pique the interest of many PS1 era or classic PC gamers. They were there for many of Bullfrog & Lionhead studios’ best works from Theme Park to Black & White so they’re no strangers to sim games.