Dominic L
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TheSixthAxis Latest Reviews
Sometimes, you do have to wonder what’s wrong with people on the internet. Wildlight Entertainment’s Highguard sure has come in for a cavalcade of online hate, because… erm… it was the final trailer shown at The Game Awards? Or was it because it wasn’t Half Life 3? Maybe because it was just a bit different? It’s hard to tell sometimes.
No matter whether it’s a book, movie or video game, there’s a special, deep-seated satisfaction to returning to a world that you know and love. Pandora is such a world. Home to the Na’vi, and bursting with neon flora and fauna, incredible creatures and the iconic floating islands, James Cameron’s fictional planet remains amongst the most vibrantly-realised sci-fi settings of the modern era. From the Ashes takes us back to this place, a new expansion for Ubisoft’s excellent Frontiers of Pandora, while tying in with Avatar: Fire and Ash, the brand-new cinematic outing for the franchise. It’s a return that’s well worth making.
Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road is a football game that feels, almost wholeheartedly, like it’s not really about football. This is a sports drama through and through, focusing on the interpersonal relationships, the individual journeys, and the yearning for acceptance that epitomises our teenage years, rather than sporting glory. You play as Destin Bellows, a young man with a heart condition, who appears to hate football and attends South Cirrus Academy, a school where football is banned. None of this really screams the word ‘football’ – or ‘soccer’ if you’re so inclined – and yet, Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road also revels in the joy, the purity, and the companionship that football can bring. This juxtaposition also makes it one of the best sports RPGs you’ll find.
If you’ve been gaming for as long as I have, there’s now a period of your gaming life that falls into the ‘classical’ era. The 8-bit and 16-bit consoles forged gaming as we know it today, with 2D sprites and burgeoning 3D techniques transporting us to worlds we’d previously only imagined. Zenovia Interactive want you to remember those days, with their latest title, Neon Inferno, set to revitalise the 2D run ‘n’ gun genre, while leaning on modern technology to make this one of the best-looking side scrollers of recent years.
The original Aaero came out of nowhere, and remains, to this day, one of my favourite rhythm-action games. Merging the classic gunplay of Space Harrier and Panzer Dragoon with musical movement was an inspired creative decision, and Aaero had you riding the rails – called ribbons here – in time with a bass-heavy electronic soundtrack, using your craft to mimic the changing notes. Aaero2: Black Razor Edition sees the Mad Fellows team returning to their signature series, this time boasting a stellar soundtrack from Monstercat, new multiplayer modes, and additional music packs, promising to take players on an even wilder ride through space.
You might wonder how a demon making a pact with the Devil to eat the Moon translates into a game about skateboarding. I’ve played Skate Story and I still can’t entirely answer that. What I can tell you is that Skate Story is a beautiful, surreal, poetic journey through the underworld, emblazoned with neon, crystal, and hellfire. It is unlike anything else you’ve played this year, and about as far from Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater as it’s possible to be, while sharing the same basic mechanics. Somehow, it works. Perhaps developer Sam Eng might also have made a pact of their own.
Role-playing video games have been around almost as long as D&D itself, but for every step they take towards modernity, many of the fundamentals remain the same. Octopath Traveler 0 is a game that’s more aware of that than any other AAA release this year. It readily leans on RPG fundamentals like turn-based combat, grinding for experience and epic storytelling, while aping the 16-bit visuals of classics like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI. It’s also a reworking of the mobile title, Champions of the Continent, but, for all of that, Octopath Traveler 0 looks and feels every inch the modern RPG.
What is Kirby Air Riders? That’s the question I’ve found myself wrestling with throughout my time with it in the past couple of weeks. Is it a kart racer? Well… kind of. Is it a vehicular combat game? Sure, you could say that. Is it a multiplayer platform, designed almost completely to be played with others? Yes. Definitely. Yet there’s still a nagging feeling that Kirby Air Riders is one of those games that exists purely for its own reasons. As the first non-Smash Bros game to be directed by Masahiro Sakurai in over a decade, it carries an odd weight of expectation, only adding to the strange and slightly off-kilter vibes you’ll find when you check in for Kirby Air Riders.
Tetris has Tetrominos. Lumines has blocks. Tetris tasks you with forming lines. Lumines tasks you with forming blocks. They’re two sides of the same block-dropping coin, and while Tetris is instantly recognisable as one of the most iconic, generation-defining games of all time, Lumines can stake a claim to its own equally important place in history.
Time has gone very squiffy in Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment. Set during Tears of the Kingdom, and following Zelda’s disappearance into a sinkhole beneath Hyrule Castle, Zelda awakens in a clearing in the forest. This isn’t her Hyrule though, and it soon becomes clear that she’s travelled back in time, all the way to Hyrule’s very beginning. There she meets King Rauru and Queen Sonia, the original founders and rulers of the iconic kingdom, and they take her in, lost as she is.