Charlie Kelly
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Writing For
Checkpoint GamingLatest Reviews
You are a teenage girl in love with another girl for the first time—your best friend. You don’t know if she loves you back or even likes you that way. The weight of the entire world is on your shoulders.
Western audiences may be less aware, but Nihon Falcom is quietly one of the biggest and hardest-working RPG genre smiths games have ever seen. Their most popular series include the beloved Legend of Heroes and Trails, two pairs of long-running turn-based adventures that provide epic political fantasy stories with what feels like hundreds...
When the creators of some of the most influential RPGs of the last 20 years in Persona announced they were creating a brand new IP in Metaphor: ReFantazio, you better believe many eyes were on them. After a long wait, the brand new fantasy venture is here.
Following a long five and a half years in early access, part automation and part survival game Satisfactory has finally released into 1.0. Having players control a space explorer to mine, gather resources, and create facilities on an alien planet, players were building this game at the same time as developers...
The year is 2006. The remake of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead has dropped two years earlier, as did its iconic parody in Shaun of the Dead. Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead is still a few years from dominating our TV screens. Zombie horror love is bubbling. Schoolyard debates are...
Wild Bastards
There’s little in games that thrill me more than solid, snappy first-person-shooter gunplay and titles in the roguelike genre. Even greater is the simple but still to this day galaxy brain idea of merging the two, creating to me some of the best and most fun to play titles of...
There has been a stealth tactics-shaped hole in my heart since genre game smiths Mimimi Games, developers of Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew, Desperados III and Shadow Tactics shuttered late last year. Gone is that tactical feeling of infiltrating areas and pulling off the impossible in real-time. Until now. Coming to save me and...
Akimbot
Fifteen years since the last game in the Jak and Daxter franchise released, and I’m still on the hunt for a title that made me feel the way the original trilogy. High-octane action with shooting, platforming, collecting and many a shenanigan to get into, my child brain was rewired. Captivated....
It’s hard to have any nuanced discussion about Concord without talk quickly becoming volatile. It’s either unreasonable ‘concerns’ such as characters having pronouns (as any living being does), a constant barrage of reminders from both concerned well-meaning people and naysayers about the dwindling player count or general live-service video game fatigue. None...
Four years after its reveal, Black Myth: Wukong, the hotly anticipated game from developer Science Works is here. It is an action RPG that adapts the Chinese mythology story of Journey to the West, with jaw-dropping views, flashy combat, and animations topped with striking, challenging bosses. It’s understandable why such a hook has...
The vapidity, personalities, and other pure junk to come out of reality dating shows like The Bachelorette or Love Island are long-standing in the entertainment industry. So much so that it feels like its own trashy art form, with rabid fans desperate to find peers to talk to engage in office water cooler...
Cat Quest III
Getting overexcited for big spectacle games is too much of a regular occurrence in our industry. Rarely is focus spent on the smaller scoped but incredibly well-executed projects. We need to go back to our roots. We need to give flowers to simple and clean games, much like the wise,...
