GameOnAUS's Reviews
Hot Wheels Unleashed is the definitive arcade racing experience that shows off just how cool these Hot Wheels car collections and whacky tracks can be realised for both young gamers and old nostalgic legends alike.
Hell Let Loose is an outstanding WWII first person shooter with the most authentic experience I’ve had in a game. The sounds and visuals are incredibly detailed and immersive, and the battlefields have been faithfully designed to reflect key battle locations.
Omno is a beautiful puzzle game I enjoyed playing with my daughter that’s fun to explore and not too challenging. There are some mind bending challenges towards the end, but often looking at them from different views will help reveal the solution. It’s really impressive that this game was made by just one person and I look forward to his future projects.
The Ascent is one of the best games I’ve played this year with amazing visuals, story and gameplay that sucks you right in from the opening scenes. Playing co-op is a heck of a lot of fun and single player is just as good with challenging gun fights and so much of the world of Veles to explore. I hope Neon Giant have plans for either DLC or a sequel because I will buy the heck out of it to keep supporting them making such great games.
The Forgotten City is a fantastic emulation of Roman times and I really enjoyed manipulating the time loop mechanic. The casual pace of unraveling the mystery through conversations and testing the golden rule was intriguing and kept me wanting to find out what happens next. This was all backed up by outstanding voice acting and visuals that really invested me in each character.
Microsoft Flight Simulator runs amazingly well on the Xbox Series X and has been a surreal experience that will stay with me for some time. The revised tutorials and new discovery tours are superbly designed to explore wonderful locations in beautiful detail, as well as optimisations for the PC version available at the launch on consoles. It’s an experience that every type of gamer should witness for themselves.
The Elder Scrolls Online: Blackwood has much to offer new and veteran players alike, with customisable companions being the highlight, giving players more goals to achieve and good reasons to revisit old zone content.
Chivalry 2 is an outstanding medieval multiplayer combat game that sways more towards the Monty Python lighter comedic side than true historical accuracy, and if you’re one to look on the bright side of life, Chivalry 2 has plenty on offer. The combat is by far the best feature, having me shifting in my chair to swing my weapon true at my enemy’s head.
Biomutant is a beauty to behold with environments begging to be explored, and the combat is fluid, agile and a heck of a lot of fun. The mini boss creatures are challenging enough, but the worldeaters are something else entirely. The wilderness does feel a little too empty at times, even with mounts and vehicles, and fast travel doesn’t help in this regard. However, when you do get in and explore that cave, abandoned ruin or underground bunker, you’re rewarded with copious amounts of loot and components.
Gears 5: Hivebusters is a short an enjoyable change of pace, playing as Scorpio Squad through their origin story. It runs and looks incredible on the Xbox Series X and it’s the type of expansion I love because it adds more story to an already awesome base game.
Despite being an Early Access title, Everspace 2 is amazing to play and there’s a whopping 25 hours of gameplay available to play now. There’s twelve hours of fully voice acted story which drives you forward, but it’s the free exploration of open space that is the most exciting aspect. The puzzles are cleverly designed into asteroids or derelict ships, and exploring planetary atmosphere was thrilling.
The Medium is another fantastic game from Bloober Team. Whilst not as scary and anxiety-inducing as previous games, it’s more creepy and supernatural dealing with the spirit realm. The dual realities feature is by far the best element of this game and I loved exploring both the real and spirit worlds for clues to solve puzzles and progress the story. I sometimes felt restricted with the fixed camera angles, and had an occasionally glitch in a cutscene, but overall the voice acting enhanced an awesome story that is well worth playing through.
Dirt 5 is an excellent racing game and is awesome fun to play with various race modes to suit all types of racers. Fans of the Colin McRae/Dirt series will sit in the drivers seat with ease, but there’s enough variety in game modes and track locations that it feels like a fresh iteration. On the Xbox Series X, the graphics are insane, however I did notice a drop in overall look and performance when I played on my original Xbox One.
If you’ve played any of the Serious Sam games, you’ll likely remember they never were outstanding in the graphics department, mainly due to having so many monsters to fight on screen at once. Whilst some of the character animations weren’t the best, some of the level environments were amazing. We had a great time playing Serious Sam 4 co-op slaying hordes of monsters with lots of laughs at the hilarious and perfectly-timed one-liners.
I spent over 5 hours in Firewatch and loved every minute as I got more intrigued by the story as events unfolded. The ultimate outcome of the story is quite grim, so fair warning to anyone playing with kids watching towards the end. It’s a great game for those times where you want to play something but don’t want to worry too much about multiplayer or difficult gameplay mechanics. The story left me thinking long after playing and I highly recommend checking the game out on Xbox Game Pass.
Pagan: Control is a fantastic look into the mind and history of Far Cry 4’s villain, Pagan Min. You certainly see how events from his past has shaped him into who he was.
Horizon Forbidden West is an absolute treasure that is not only a welcome sequel to Horizon Zero Dawn, but also arguably one of the best games to grace the PlayStation 5 thus far – with a solid claim to being the best native PS5 game yet.
Gran Turismo 7 is a technological marvel and a top-gear motorsports game to boot. It’s a love-letter to car culture, automotive technology, design, and history, and if you have any sort of interest in cars or racing games, this should be very much in the digital garage that is your PlayStation’s storage drive.
Broadly, however, Sniper Elite 5 is outstanding – it’s easily the best game in the series and offers a rich, rewarding and replayable adventure which can be as easy or as challenging as you like. The levels are well-crafted and detailed, the payoff when a shot or trap comes together is extremely high, and the ability to play from “the other side” is a welcome feature too.
With an enviable amount of content across its various modes, a brilliant soundtrack, solid visuals, and an already insanely large player base, Splatoon 3 is a brilliant game I wholeheartedly recommend picking up. If it can fix the issues with its online matchmaking, it can be even better.