Jam Walker
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Stevivor 
Checkpoint Gaming 
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I was obsessed with real-time strategy games as a kid, and when I hit my teens I gained an intense love for tabletop wargames and Civilization. I find myself firmly in the back-half of my 30s now, which feels just about bang on time for a foray into the world of historical grand strategy games.
2001’s Stronghold has held a delightful little home in my brain ever since I first played the demo off of some magazine cover disk. It was wickedly addictive, utterly gorgeous, and had a wonderful British humour that helped set it apart from other historical strategy games of the era. I eventually bought the full game and fell completely in love with it; I then rekindled that love with the Definitive Edition remaster we got back in 2023.
2012’s Far Cry 3 is undoubtedly one of the most influential games of the HD era. It wasn’t the first open-world action game of course, but its enormous critical and commercial success quickly made it the blueprint for just about any and every such release that followed.
Broken Roads attempts to put an Australian spin on the classic Fallout formula. Unfortunately it succeeds just as much at aping vibes from the modern iterations of those games, as just like each of them, it’s also releasing in a dramatically buggy state. At this stage, I can’t in good faith recommend a purchase of the game at launch.
I never played Pillars of Eternity, so when Avowed showed up offering a whole new angle on its universe, my reaction was pretty much that of a shrug. I’m so glad I jumped into it though, because not only have I loved playing it through, it’s also gotten me invested enough in the Pillars world to download and install the original game.
I’ve always had a soft spot for earnest ‘B’ games. Games that clearly had aims of being a top-tier product that just couldn’t quite get there. Typically they fall short for reasons of time and budget, but often also for being burdened with an overly ambitious vision to begin with. By all rights Computer Artworks’ 2002 The Thing is a game that should’ve been dead, buried, and forgotten forever. It was never praised especially highly in its day, and licensed game adaptations of its ...
The video game industry is shockingly bad at preserving its history.
I’ve been an avid fan of real-time strategy games for a long damn time. In fact, I’m old enough to have basically grown up in parallel to the entire genre. Unfortunately, this also means that as these games have evolved to become faster and faster over the years, my reflexes have naturally become slower and I’ve struggled to keep pace with a genre that I love. Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin is an incredibly fast-paced RTS game, at least by the standards of what I’m usually co...
It’s enormously frustrating when a game is mismarketed. It’s also enormously frustrating when you really can’t talk about a game on its own terms without talking about another.