Sammy Barker
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Push SquareLatest Reviews
The true brilliance of tycoon titles like Two Point Museum is their ability to keep you occupied. In this sequel to Two Point Hospital and Two Point Campus, there’s always something to keep you occupied: a new interactive exhibit you need to research, a staff member you want to educate, or an expedition you have to send your experts on.
Genshin Impact has changed the console gaming landscape. Once solely the fancy of smartphone gamers, free-to-play gachas have become big business on PS5 and PS4, with many of the format’s most played titles subscribing to the business model.
The long-running Nikki series – not to be confused with Stellar Blade dev Shift Up’s saucy mobile shooter NIKKE: Goddess of Victory – has been styling smartphones across various iterations for several years. This version, available on console for the first time and introducing an enormous whimsical open world, is by far the most ambitious, however. It’s also utterly brilliant.
Slitterhead – directed by Japan Studio veteran Keiichiro Toyama – feels like a spiritual successor to Siren, Gravity Rush, and Soul Sacrifice all at the same time. This inventive, unusual survival horror is far from perfect, with inconsistent visuals, repetition, and some unrefined gameplay systems. But if you’ve been lamenting the loss of PlayStation’s oddball first-party output, this is the closest you’re going to get to it.
Dutch developer Guerrilla seemingly achieved the impossible with Horizon Zero Dawn. After a decade slaving away over first-person shooter series Killzone, the studio effectively retooled itself as a maker of open world RPGs, and sold tens of millions of copies in the process. The intellectual property has since seen the release of a sequel and a PSVR2 spin-off, with a family-friendly LEGO adaptation imminent.
Sports games are outrageously difficult to create, so you’ve got to give credit to Sheffield-based studio Steel City Interactive for having the guts to step into the ring. EA Sports defined generations with its Fight Night franchise, but lagging sales mean it’s moved on to the more lucrative UFC license. Undisputed swings for the fences by attempting to fill the gaping void left behind, and while it could use more iteration, it’s not a bad first effort by any stretch.
We’ve had more fun with EA Sports FC 25 than we have with any soccer sim for quite some time. Perhaps that’s because, outside of the review period, we largely abandoned EA Sports FC 24 – or perhaps, whisper it quietly, it’s because the footie franchise is in a good place. Either way, a ton of under-the-hood depth paired with the more accessible Rush mode has actually helped us to fall in love with the beautiful game again – and considering the state of our beloved Man United right now, that’s no mean feat.
The life of a sports game reviewer can be a miserable one, but while much of Visual Concepts’ culturally colossal NBA 2K series is recycled year-on-year, it rarely settles for raw iteration. This is a developer that, for all its faults, genuinely appears committed to creating the best sports sim on the market – and it tends to lap its competitors through sheer budget alone.
Ballistic Moon’s remake of Until Dawn is proving one of our most difficult review assignments of the year. Here’s the rub: Supermassive Games’ cult interactive movie is still very much one of the best examples of the genre you can find on any console, and we highly recommend you play it. However, the PS4 version is just nine-years-old, and while this new-gen re-release does demonstrate some seismic graphical upgrades, it’s largely the same experience at its core – with no discounts or incentives for existing owners. To make matters worse, the original runs at 60fps with PS5 backwards compatibility, while this new edition targets an inconsistent 30fps, which feels like a downgrade.
Ballistic Moon’s remake of Until Dawn is proving one of our most difficult review assignments of the year. Here’s the rub: Supermassive Games’ cult interactive movie is still very much one of the best examples of the genre you can find on any console, and we highly recommend you play it. However, the PS4 version is just nine-years-old, and while this new-gen re-release does demonstrate some seismic graphical upgrades, it’s largely the same experience at its core – with no discounts or incentives for existing owners. To make matters worse, the original runs at 60fps with PS5 backwards compatibility, while this new edition targets an inconsistent 30fps, which feels like a downgrade.