Posts By Mat Growcott

Game Pass is getting restructured. First party games are leaving PlayStation Plus, and there’s no evidence they’re coming back. The grand experiment is over, and it looks like the glory days are gone. It was supposed to be a shake up on an industry that desperately needed shaking up. The traditional model of paying increasingly high amounts for increasingly safe and padded out video games was starting to feel hard to justify. Many of us were paying ...

People are talking about Final Fantasy XIII again. A vaguely worded Square Enix post on Twitter has fans discussing the possibility of a remake. But is it a trilogy that even needs a major revisit? XIII was an important game to me, for a variety of reasons some too personal to get into. But it was the first Final Fantasy game I’d covered as press. I was surprised people were so vehemently against it at the time, and especially because…

Red Dead Redemption never officially came to PC. So it’s unusual that the PlayStation Store is currently announcing that it will be making the jump. Yes, you read that right. The PS4 version of Red Dead Redemption was given PC-centric copy for a while there on the store. I just wish I could say that it wasn’t a moment too late. It would be hypocritical of me to grumble too much about the original PS3 classic getting a release on…

There’s been a lot of talk lately about where the industry goes from here. It’s is in a bad place. Games that are too big to fail are failing. Releases are becoming fewer, and developers are playing it absolutely safe. And yet the answer is right under our noses: Fortnite. Now, I can’t say that I love this future. But every so often the topic of Fortnite will come up amongst myself and colleagues and although it’s not our cup…

Avowed has been delayed into 2025 to give it room within a chockablock run of Xbox releases later this year. Which would be all good and well… but what releases are we talking about? Take out the PC-style strategy games, Call of Duty (which will be everywhere), DLC and AA games and you’re left with Indiana Jones. Which I’m not going to knock for a second, but if that’s your main release for the entire year, then something has gone…

Microsoft will close the Xbox 360 store at some undisclosed time today, and that really is the end of an era. There’s a lot of positives to say about that store, and we’ll get to them in good time. Gamesreviews is well over ten years old now, and when we started out, the 360 store was the one to beat. It’s hard to get my head around the idea that we’ve outlasted a console store, especially one so popular. For…

“It feels a bit cheap.” Our first reaction to the Turtle Beach Stealth Ultra was not a good one. In fact, you can count our second reaction to that as well. From there, it has seriously grown on us. Search Google and you’ll find a seemingly endless list of articles and videos declaring this controller an Xbox Elite killer. Well, my Xbox Elite killed itself. I didn’t need gimmicks, I needed a solid device for PC gaming. So obviously I…

Look up a list of great controllers for PC gaming and Microsoft’s Elite 2 will come up more often than not. And those articles are correct: it’s a great controller. That is, it’s a great controller with one giant caveat. From the moment I cracked it open, I felt I was playing with something special. Heavy, sturdy to the touch, and easily customisable, it felt like a really decent piece of kit. And it was. Until it wasn’t. That is…

Overnight, Retroachievements launched its Gamecube support. More than 100 classic Nintendo games now support achievements when emulated, and thousands of fans turned out in support.  When I woke up this morning, nearly 100 people were playing Super Mario Sunshine. Dozens more were playing other big hitters like Mario Kart: Double Dash and Super Smash Bros. Melee. I would expect those records to be broken again this evening, as more people get involved and the ...

Gaming disorder has been in the press again. Not fully understood or even accepted as real by some, every so often there’s a spate of discussion. This has been going on for over a decade. This time, it’s this piece that has started the discussion. It’s interesting and sympathetic, and I’m not going to go to hard in on the piece itself because those experiences happened. Like anything that takes very specific individual cases from a much ...