Beyond the Ice Palace II is quite the relic. The first game came out in 1988 on our beloved Speccy, the Commodore 64, Alan Sugar’s turdbox plus the Amiga and the Atari ST. Published by Elite Systems, formerly Richard Wilcox Software, they’ll be more familiar to contemporary gamers due to […]

Beyond the Ice Palace II – PS5 Review

3D Don’t Die Mr Robot is an arcade style dodging game from UK dev team Infinite State games and is a sequel, of sorts, to their 2014 original Don’t Die Mr Robot.  Now, we’ve got a soft spot for Infinite State Games here.  The original game was one of the first […]

3D Don’t Die Mr Robot

Recall: Empty Wishes is a narrative horror title from Puff Hook Studio. This is their first fully-fledged effort and, whilst it hasn’t quite resonated with me, there is an interesting story here and attempt to tell that story in an absorbing way. Unfortunately, it’s a very linear experience with simplistic […]

Recall: Empty Wishes – PS5 Review

Under Defeat is a vertically-scrolling shoot ’em up that has an interesting history.  Developed by Japanese shoot ’em up experts G.Rev, the game originally showed up in Japanese arcades, running on the Sega NAOMI hardware.  This made it a perfect candidate for a Dreamcast port in 2006, one of the last […]

Under Defeat – PS5 Review

From dev noobzilla and publisher Silesia Games comes the latest in a genre we’d never previously been particularly aware of, let alone interested in. Cats and Seek: Dino Park follows on from the previous in the series, that being Cats and Seek: Osaka. Silesia have published a lot of hidden […]

Cats and Seek: Dino Park – PS4 Review

Ever 17: The Out of Infinity is another visual novel from KID that’s been given the remake treatment. Originally a 2002 release, this new version adds a lot of new art and an official English translation. Under the hood, it’s essentially the same game but the story and setting seems […]

Ever 17: The Out of Infinity – PS4 Review

Alright, back to the visual novel gulag. I’ve avoided them for a while but this one at least feels historic, in a sense. Never 7: The End of Infinity originally released in 2000 in Japan and was previously only available to Westerners via a fan translation. Now KID’s effort has […]

Never 7: The End of Infinity – PS4 Review

It’s something of a shame that there’s some wonderful throwback first-person-shooters that don’t quite escape the PC’s gravitational pull. Even when some do make it across, I often wonder about the quality of the ports and controllers just don’t have the precision of a mouse. With that in mind, I […]

Turbo Overkill – PS5 Review

Build Lands is a casual building game from Brazilian-based Yaw Studios and after a 2022 PC release, it’s now out on console.  Now, “casual building game” doesn’t tell you much and we’ll get onto that in a bit but this is genuinely a hard game to classify as it’s not […]

Build Lands – PS5 Review

From developer Gameloft’s Australian studio, publisher Netflix Games and Houghton Mifflin comes a revival of a series only peripherally familiar to us over here in the UK, that being Carmen Sandiego. The first game in the long running series was originally released on formats of the time in 1985 as […]

Carmen Sandiego – PS5 Review

Techno Banter almost put us off at the first juncture because of the name alone. Banter. It’s such an insipid word. Used to excuse all kinds of boorish behaviour by awful knuckle dragging idiots. Bullying if you ask us. Thankfully it’s just a name as it turns out that Techno […]

Techno Banter – PS5 Review

Shootvaders: The Beginning is, as the title suggests, a variation on the one-screen shoot ’em up style most obviously associated with games like Space Invaders and it comes to us by way of Thailand’s own 7 Raven Studios. Released in 2023, this one was a bit of a surprise when it showed […]

Shootvaders: The Beginning – PS4 Review