Halloween may be over, but the scary season doesn’t have to end if you don’t want it to. Or if you really hate your relatives.
Either way, it’s a good time for Zen Studios to release Pinball M, a new collection of horror-inspired pinball tables for Pinball FX, which are available individually or together as the Death Save Bundle.
And while one of the tables doesn’t really fit the horror theme — unless you’re super scared of pig people — all five are fun in their own ways.
Back in the days when every big action movie got a corresponding video game, one of the unspoken rules was that even if it was a bad game, fans of the film might still enjoy it if it’s true to the movie.
Which is where we find the dystopian sci-fi first-person RoboCop: Rogue City (PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC), which is set up as a sequel to the iconic movie series. While shooter fans will quickly quit in frustration, people who loved the movies — and who can be forgiving where certain aspects of the titular character are concerned — will enjoy this as mindless fun.
It’s always risky when the hero of a video game series hands the reigns to someone else. For every time it’s worked (Marvel’s Spider-Man 2), there are just as many when it didn’t (Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons Of Liberty).
Thankfully, the third-person survival horror game Alan Wake II (PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC.) falls squarely in the former category by being just as much fun when Mr. Wake is missing as it is when he’s around.
Among the many interesting characters in the comedic sci-fi first-person shooter High On Life was Knifey, a sentient and psychotic knife who could be used to get around like the grappling hook from Halo Infinite or Horizon Forbidden West.
During actual combat…well, we all know the cliché about bringing a knife to a gunfight. It’s probably why, despite the name, Knifey isn’t the main weapon you use in the first add-on for Life, High On Knife.
But while Knife may not turn Life into a hack & slash action game, that doesn’t mean Knifey isn’t at the center of this game.
Like seconds of a good meal, add-ons for video games can sometimes be more of a good thing, sometimes just more of the same, and sometimes just too much.
Thankfully, it’s the former category that we find Resident Evil 4: Separate Ways, an add-on for the recent and excellent remake of Resident Evil 4.
For some, fighting games are all about beating the crap out of their friends. Or complete strangers they meet online. For others, though, they’re about the challenge of taking on a computer intelligence, one that may even be more skilled than they could ever hope to be. It is for the latter group — of which I am a proud, paid up member — that I present the following critique of the new Mortal Kombat 1 (PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch, PC) from the perspective of someone who only played it — and only wanted to play it — as a single-player game.
There’s an old saying: The devil’s in the details. But when you’re making a massive game like the sci-fi space opera action role-playing game Starfield — which is out now for Xbox Series X/S and PC, and is easily one of the best games of the year — sometimes it’s the little details that get lost in the shuffle, especially when you have so many big details to worry about. But in playing Starfield, I noticed a couple little things that I wanted to applaud the good people at Bethesda Game Studios for including, things that won’t make a big difference to a lot of people, but things I noticed and appreciated.
Many of us aspire to greatness…and many of us fail. But sometimes, in failing, we still manage to do something good. It’s something I thought about while playing the ambitious but underwhelming and yet still engaging fantasy first-person shooter Immortals Of Aveum (PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC). While it falls short of what would seem to be its lofty goals, what Aveum does offer is exciting combat in interesting places against competent enemies, and that’s enough to make it kind of fun.
While the modern military first-person shooter CrossfireX was an unmitigated disaster (hence its prominent place on my Worst Video Games Of 2022 list), the good people at Smilegate are not giving up on this series. After all, the original Crossfire is still big, especially in China and South Korea. Maybe that’s why Smilegate are bringing the series to VR with Crossfire: Sierra Squad, which will be released for PlayStation VR2 on August 29th, and later for Oculus and SteamVR.
And it’s because of the game’s impending release that, this week, some of those good people at Smilegate — who, for the record, are the not the people who made CrossfireX — came to Los Angeles to let game journalists have some hands-on time with the PSVR2 version of the game.
Note: The screenshots in this preview were provided by Smilegate, and not from my playthrough of the game.