GamesHub's Reviews
Beautiful, charming, smartly-designed and a joy to play, Please Fix The Road is one of 2022’s best puzzle games.
Rogue Legacy 2 is the perfect sequel. It retains the core of what made the original fantastic, with every feature adding tremendously to the experience. Its cleverly revised class system adds near-limitless gameplay variety, which makes each attempt fun – even when you fail abysmally. This game is everything I wanted from the follow-up, and then some.
Neon White has style. Neon White has intensity. Neon White makes me feel alive.
The unique ideas that worked in Monster Hunter Rise have been finely honed, and the end-game now has the content it was sorely lacking. With a rock-solid foundation and a roadmap of promising post-launch additions on the horizon, Sunbreak is quite simply an excellent Monster Hunter expansion.
Challenge and satisfaction go hand-in-hand in this sim, making each choice anxiety-induced and rewarding in equal measure. In that regard, Two Point Campus gets so much right about university life – and the management simulator genre.
Cult of the Lamb is a unique experience bursting with personality. It looks and sounds gorgeous, and the gameplay loop is engaging, rewarding, and highly enjoyable from start to finish. Sacrifices and rituals to maintain your faith in the game aren’t necessary, given Massive Monster has created such a shining, standout piece of work.
Immortality is a game that will haunt you. Its sinister atmosphere is exceptionally powerful. Its layered narrative about art and artists will leave you with more thoughts, ideas, and questions than answers. It will have you clambering for someone to seek solace with afterwards. It may very well see you diving back in, hunting for closure with any clues you may have missed – just a few more hints. Something, anything. Immortality is a remarkable piece of work, and an outstanding example of the potency interactive storytelling can have.
The Last of Us Part 1 doesn’t create any lasting memories about the experience that weren’t already there from the beginning. For that reason, my thoughts about the game’s existence as a product remain dubious. But as a creative work in and of itself, The Last of Us is still exceptional, and I’m happy to have had reason to experience it again, in a new context and an updated format.
One of the first characters you meet, Ida, says that Casey’s experience in the hospital is much like the life of an older person; piecing things together as best you can. As you wander the halls of Wayward Strand’s hospital, you too piece together little fragments of entire lives lived into a rich, heartfelt story that will leave you re-entering reality with a renewed sense of curiosity.
Return to Monkey Island isn’t a grand reinvention of point-and-click adventure games in mechanics or narrative ambition. It is, quite literally, a return. It sticks to its own identity, and aims to be the best version of itself – a comforting, charming game with great characters and amusingly esoteric puzzles. That a new Monkey Island game exists with Gilbert and Grossman at the helm makes Return to Monkey Island an attraction well worth the curiosity. And that this traditional format still satisfies while remaining largely unchanged, several decades later, speaks volumes about how timeless their ideas and this world have always been.
Sparks of Hope has a real sense of twinkling charm – one that could pull a smile from even the most hardened heart. There’s a vivacious, beating heart at the centre of this adventure, and it makes every new world, and every new fight a veritable joy to complete.
Nothing about God of War Ragnarok feels anything less than meaningful. Refined to the highest degree, every hour you spend with Kratos, Atreus, and the memorable characters of Ragnarok feels fulfilling – whether it be journeying across the Nordic realms with your companions, taking in the beautiful sights and enjoying idle chit chat, overcoming the odds in invigorating and varied melee combat encounters, or sharing in the deeply emotional connection between incredibly strong and nuanced characters.
Through interactions with these people and many others – the insights into their lives gleaned from talking to them while they work, or the hopes and fears they reveal around the dinner table as you share pottage and bread – Tassing comes to feel like as real a place I’ve ever visited in a video game. As the months and years roll by, you feel those layers settling in, the weight of decisions these people have made – and that you’ve made too – shaping the history of the place.
While its ideas may be supernaturally-charged, and inspired by one of the strangest periods in Marvel Comics, it remains grounded and personal – imbuing its excellent tactical combat with high emotions and stakes. In dark times, light can still shine – and in Marvel’s Midnight Suns, you and your team of heroes are that light.
One Piece Odyssey walks the line between being a great anime adaptation and an engaging video game admirably. It feels happy, bright, and true to the tone and content of the source material, and it succeeds in making you feel close to the characters as you join them on their grand adventure.
A Space for the Unbound only looks pixels deep, but it is a masterpiece for its breadth of storytelling, its authenticity, and how it tackles difficult topics, from cultural expectations to mental health. As the game ended, it left me with a beautiful feeling of closure, accompanied by a hankering for cherry-chocolate-flavoured cake and Indonesian food.
I Was a Teenage Exocolonist is a beautiful game, a synth-laden ode to growing up and allowing yourself to fall, fail, succeed and explore in a posthuman world that asks thoughtful questions about what it means to exist alongside the natural environment.
The Resident Evil 4 remake features several smart choices that help it feel true to the original, but also shapes the adventure into something that overall feels more cohesive, modern, and thrilling than ever. It’s a stellar example of how to revitalise a classic.
Dredge is a masterclass in atmosphere, worldbuilding, tactile mechanics, and game flow. Like all sinister-feeling things, by the time you get to the end of the line you might wish you had never kept going. But in Dredge, it’s impossible not to.
Like its predecessor, Burning Shores tends towards more abstract sci-fi elements, particularly in its final stanza – which includes one of the largest and grandest scale fights in Horizon – but in focusing on character and human relationships, this unique expansion successfully charts tricky waters.