This past weekend, at a fan event in Los Angeles, the good people at Gearbox and 2K Games gave fans and journalists a chance to play Borderlands 4, which will be released September 12th on Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and PC, and for Switch 2 at a later date.
What follows are my impressions of the game (though the screenshots are not from my demo; they were provided by Gearbox).
In the original Death Stranding, the dominant mechanic was walking. You walked here, you walked there, you walked most everywhere.
So it’s interesting that, in Death Stranding 2: On The Beach (PlayStation 5), we’re instead encouraged to take a drive, while keeping so much else about the game the same…including how engaging it can be (and how flawed it can get).
Given all the different places Lara Croft has been to over the years, you’d expect the virtual pinball tables in Tomb Raider Pinball for Pinball FX (PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Switch, PC) would be set in interesting, and international, places.
But while you’d be wrong, you won’t be disappointed by this virtual pinball machine, since both are as fun as running away from a giant boulder.
As someone who’s been writing about video games for more than 30 years, one of my pet peeves is when a game developer denies that their game is similar to or influenced by another game or a movie or a TV show. “So, your game is a sci-fi first-person shooter in which you play as a supersoldier in a mech suit…but it’s nothing like Halo? Really?!?”
It’s why I was pleasantly surprised when a representative of Nekki asked me if I wanted to see their upcoming third-person shooter Spine at this year’s Summer Game Fest: Play Days event in Los Angeles…and almost immediately said it was influenced by, and somewhat similar to, both the Batman: Arkham games and the John Wick movies.
And then I was pleasantly surprised again when she handed me the controller.
Here are my impressions of the game.
Like many recent co-op video games, the first-person sci-fi shooter Warhammer 40,000: Darktide has consistently made improvements and fixes since it launched in November of 2022 for PC, October of 2023 for Xbox Series X|S, and December of 2024 for PlayStation 5.
But for the new add-on coming June 23rd, the good people at Fatshark are also making some major structural changes, as well as adding a fifth type of playable character, as I got to see first-hand during a demo session at this past weekend’s Summer Game Fest: Play Days event in Los Angeles.
A few days ago, at the Summer Game Fest: Play Days event in Los Angeles, Capcom gave me an opportunity to play the unique, and potentially divisive, upcoming sci-fi, third-person shooter Pragmata, which is coming to PlayStation 5, Xbox X|S, and PC next year.
What follows are my impressions of this game.
This past weekend, at the Summer Game Fest: Play Days event in Los Angeles, the good people at Sharkmob and Level Infinite gave me an opportunity to play the upcoming sci-fi, third-person, open world, extraction shooter Exoborne, which is coming to PC this year, and to PlayStation 5 and Xbox X|S at a later date.
What follows are my impressions of this game.
As a kid who grew up in the suburbs in the ’70s and ’80s, I heard many of the urban legends that were passed around like stolen issues of Playboy: Cropsey, Bloody Mary, the one about how someone flushed a baby alligator down the toilet and now it lives in the sewers below Manhattan.
But somehow missed the one about the weird arcade game that drove people crazy.
It’s that urban legend at the center of Collin Armstrong’s new coming-of-age horror novel Polybius (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), in which the titular arcade game really ruins some gamers’ days.
In the following email interview, Armstrong talks about his personal connection to the urban legend, and how it came to be the basis of this scary story.
I used to know someone who loved to play Grand Theft Auto by running around and causing all kinds of mayhem so he could see how long he could avoid being arrested.
He’s now doing 30 years to life in state prison. Seriously.
Now, I’m not saying, implying, or suggesting there’s a connection, but I am now worried about my future after playing MANIAC, a ridiculously over-the-top, top down, arcade action game that’s like the first Grand Theft Auto if you played it like a certain someone I know in the slammer.