Reviews

Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town is a solid and enjoyable remake of a Harvest Moon classic. Yet while you get to enjoy a classic experience intact, it also feels incredibly dated given the other options available on Xbox today.

Tandem: A Tale of Shadows offers up something refreshingly different and is bursting with charm, however the premature ending will leave you wanting more. 

Smoots Golf wiggles their hips, takes aim, and promptly trips over their golfing shoes and into the water. It feels like Smoots Golf was made by people who don’t like or understand golf, as it lacks the basic features that a golfer needs to play eighteen holes. 

It’s colourful, imaginative and will make your children feel like platforming superstars. Marsupilami: Hoobadventure, completely out of nowhere, is the best Xbox kids game of the year.

It’s hard to recommend Ghoulboy. The gameplay isn’t awful, but the amount of bugs I’ve encountered have made it hard to enjoy

The Legend of Icaro is just about okay - no more than that - and it doesn’t take long for that okay hook to let you go. That okay is about the sum of it in terms of the combat and music, but the traversal lets it down.

Cheap and obviously running budget limitations, Death Park 2 does a good job of providing a solid scare-fuelled horror adventure at a low cost.

What do we have with Inspector Waffles? An absolutely brilliant point-and-click adventure. The story, characters and overall dialogue are all brilliantly written, and the puzzles encourage exploration and experimentation.

So, Call of Duty: Vanguard. The campaign is great, the multiplayer is fun and Zombies will appeal to previous fans. As an overall package Vanguard is capable of providing hours of fun - all pushed along with brilliant visuals. This is a great trip back to World War II. 

The Prince of Landis is far more successful as a story than it is a game. It’s a take on the ‘80s-kids-find-something-supernatural’ template, but pushes it in a lonely, unsettling direction that also manages to feel original. 

Battlefield 2042 is far from perfect, but it isn’t bad. It’s fun to fight and it’s great to be able to drive vehicles across huge maps. Hell, it’s even enjoyable to crash a jet into some unsuspecting soldier on the ground. There are bugs, but patches are planned so hope should be held. In the meantime, Battlefield Portal is almost worth the price of admission itself.  

Cyanide & Happiness - Freakpocalypse (Episode 1) marks a steady start for the trilogy that leaves room for improvement. You’ll almost immediately know if this weird but sometimes wonderful adventure is one which suits your tastes or not.

Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy- Definitive Edition on Xbox is an overpriced and poorly produced release which does absolutely no favours to the classic games it attempts to celebrate. The experience here is far from definitive, and aside from the sheer laziness in the graphical remastering and performance, it introduces a whole slew of performance issues.

We shrug a little at this release. We can’t form a good argument for why Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep: A Wonderlands One-Shot Adventure exists, outside of reminding players that Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is coming. It feels like a glorified billboard. But sure, we’ll go along with it.

It’s the goofing that makes Pile Up! Box by Box such a winner: when you’ve got a couple of friends or family around who fancy a platforming adventure, crafted out of cardboard, where you can stack each other on your heads, then this is the business.