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Phil Hornshaw


Favorite Games:

85 games reviewed
71.9 average score
70 median score
63.1% of games recommended

Phil Hornshaw's Reviews

Writing from a darkened apartment in Los Angeles, Phil Hornshaw lends his brain to thoughts on time travel and made-up science. He's an author and journalist, assuming one half of the blame for the books "So You Created a Wormhole: The Time Traveler's Guide to Time Travel" and "The Space Hero's Guide to Glory." He also wrote a trivia book about Resident Evil one time, and helps create "Paradox: The Time Travel Podcast." As a freelance writer, he primarily covers video games, and has contributed to Playboy.com, Complex Magazine, Digital Trends, Polygon, Kotaku, The Escapist, and GameFront.
Jun 17, 2024

With a character-driven story and a focus on enhancing its gameplay on nearly every level, The Final Shape feels like what Destiny 2 has been trying to be all along.

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7 / 10.0 - XDefiant
May 24, 2024

The fundamentals of XDefiant are good, but conflicting ideas and mechanics stop it from standing above a crowded shooter field.

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Mar 21, 2024

Though it has a somewhat steep combat learning curve and some dated open-world ideas, Rise of the Ronin does a great job of rewarding your time in its world.

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6 / 10.0 - The Inquisitor
Feb 5, 2024

Playing a medieval church cop hunting a vampire is a great concept, but blurry choices, weak combat, and a ton of handholding keep The Inquisitor from leading a compelling inquisition.

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Jan 11, 2024

Returning to a 2D perspective lets Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown perfect its controls and combat while capturing everything that was great about the heyday of the series.

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Dec 6, 2023

Though it includes a lot of familiar open-world elements, a minimalistic user interface, fun movement mechanics, and a gorgeous setting make it a blast to explore Pandora.

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Nov 17, 2023

Operation Deadlock mixes Zombies with Warzone's DMZ mode, and while the combination can create some heart-stopping battles, you have to be willing to grind to see them.

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Nov 2, 2023

Expanding and improving on the original in every way, The Talos Principle 2 is a brilliant puzzler that's most compelling during conversations with its characters.

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Oct 18, 2023

Skull Island: Rise of Kong is a boring, buggy, totally unambitious game that isn't even interesting in its failures.

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Oct 16, 2023

While Lords of the Fallen has all the right Souls-like elements, its disjointed pacing and painful checkpoint system make much of the game a slow and frustrating march.

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8 / 10 - Thymesia
Aug 16, 2022

Drawing from Bloodborne and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Thymesia creates a Souls-like experience that iterates on what's most important about From's beloved titles.

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8 / 10 - Rollerdrome
Aug 16, 2022

Developer Roll7 excellently mixes high-scoring skating gameplay with shooter ideas to make a hybrid game that's tough to put down.

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Jul 8, 2022

Void Riders is mostly more OlliOlli World, and while its new challenges won't blow you away, more of a good thing is a good thing.

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Jul 1, 2022

With an expanded endgame, new difficulty tiers, and new story content, Worldslayer adds a lot to Outriders, even if none of the additions are mind-blowing.

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There's a lot of meme potential in Stranger of Paradise thanks to its willingness to be aggressively confusing, but fun, varied combat carries its most WTF moments forward.

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Mar 7, 2022

Bungie continues to improve its shooter MMO with the best story campaign it has yet produced and a whole lot of great additional content to keep players engaged.

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Feb 14, 2022

Horizon Forbidden West sometimes packs in so much that it gets in its own way, but the many well-drawn characters populating its quests keep it compelling.

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Feb 3, 2022

Developer Roll7 has improved on every aspect of the OlliOlli franchise to create a huge, fun arcade skating game that's easy-going, but just as challenging as its predecessors.

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9 / 10 - God of War
Jan 12, 2022

God of War isn't drastically different on PC when compared to the PS4 version that launched back in 2018, but its little improvements are definitely nice ones, making this a solid PC port overall. There isn't reason enough here to buy a second copy of the game if you've already played, necessarily, but the PC version is a great reason to check out God of War for the first time for anybody who hasn't had a chance to experience it. God of War remains an excellent, gorgeous, affecting action game, and with the port to PC, it gets a handful of nice, if somewhat minor, improvements.

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Nov 23, 2021

Although some specialists can feel a bit useless at times, tweaks to the formula with Battlefield 2042 add a lot of interesting gameplay variety.

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