Lucas White
Game industry critic and reviewer
Writing For
ShackNews
TheGamer
Playstation Lifestyle
Nintendo WireLatest Reviews
Bleach being back in 2025 is wild. I was in high school back when the “Big Three” were exploding in popularity, consistently topping charts and pushing more manga and anime into mainstream spaces in the west. But while One Piece and Naruto are still a constant presence in media and...
There’s a sequence in Look Outside I’m never going to forget. I’m in a ravaged apartment, fumbling in the dark for supplies and equipment. The family that lived here was overcome by the thing outside, but it’s not over for them yet. I’m dealing with them one by one, out...
Just like its impressively long and unwieldy title, Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land is a messy game. But it’s a messy game with lofty ambitions and a lot to like, even if which pieces you end up liking are not the pieces you expected or...
When I was a kid, “edutainment” was a thing in video games, especially on PC. I had several point-and-click adventures that had me solving puzzles, answering trivia, and other brain-wrenching exercises to get by instead of simply jumping on goombas or whatever. They were neat, even if they didn’t adhere...
Koei Tecmo has come screaming into 2025 with all kinds of wins, from bringing the hype back to Ninja Gaiden to successfully shifting gears in Dynasty Warriors. Even Atelier is growing in leaps and bounds. Somehow there’s room for more, as we saw during the February 2025 State of Play....
Stories from Sol: The Gun-Dog is a remarkable tribute to PC-98 visual novels and hard sci-fi anime of a specific vintage. The visuals are pitch-perfect with multiple settings that offer different vibes, and the soundtrack is a complex beast of speaker-straining chiptunes that enhances the mood even further.
We’ve probably made life measurably worse for ourselves by building systems that feed on labor and thrive on diminishing returns. But while playing by the rules and struggling to get by is painful, there is still something innately precious about living and building what you can with the hand you’re...
To put it simply, if this was one of those retro re-releases that are basically fancy emulators with additional screen filters and save states, maybe online play as a treat, Star Wars: Episode 1: Jedi Power Battles (whew) probably would’ve been alright. Instead, we have this bizarre Frankenmaster that looks...
Phantom Brave: The Lost Hero is a clumsy-feeling game, but its scatterbrained energy comes from an admirable place of bucking standardized gameplay conventions in a genre that doesn’t budge often. The first game had some interesting ideas back 20 years ago, and those ideas are streamlined and expanded upon, without...
Blade Chimera is short, sweet, and simple. It’s also visually enthralling and just… really dang cool. It’s the perfect kind of game to run into in January 2025, especially after so much of my time up until now has been eaten by multiple dozen-hour RPGs. I blazed through this game...
It’s tough to say a lot more about Freedom Wars, despite the fact I had a lot of fun playing it! It really is the quintessential Vita game. It tries a lot of things, hits really hard on a few, and everything else doesn’t quite come together. It’s from before...
It’s a bummer combat feels like such a swing and a miss, because everything else about Fairy Tail 2 feels like an improvement from the first game. It’s a more full and lively-feeling experience, which is crucial for adapting something like a beloved anime series. The playable roster is larger,...
